Behind the Build: How StatusPRO Created the First Authentic VR NFL Simulation Game in ‘NFL PRO ERA’

NFL PRO ERA⁠ is out now on Meta Quest 2, giving players their first chance to see the field through the eyes of a real NFL quarterback⁠. In partnership with the NFL⁠ and NFL Players Association⁠ (NFLPA), StatusPRO⁠ has created the first-ever licensed NFL VR game.

To learn more about the game’s development, including how the team was able to capture the look and feel of real football and the legacy of the team that brought the game to life, read on for our in-depth Q&A.

Troy Jones (Co-Founder and CEO of StatusPRO): So [Andrew Hawkins⁠, aka Hawk] and I both are former football players. I was a Division I quarterback at Maryland and Western Kentucky. Hawk played receiver in the NFL for the Bengals and the Browns.

And initially, the product was really around how we could help improve the game and help players get better. So we built a desktop training application that took the player tracking data and recreated it to a holographic simulation, and then teams would take that product and simulate walkthroughs during the time of year where they couldn’t physically line up against each other.

So that obviously was a big problem to solve just due to the rules that you’ve seen implemented in the CBA, which is the agreement between the NFL and NFLPA that protects players and preserves the physical health and wellness of the players. When we would demo the products to the teams, we would see the players having fun and they’d just want to stay in the headset, running around. Thus, we just started thinking, “Okay. What other derivative products can be made from this training product?”

We just started thinking about a game because we were helping players simulate reps, simulate what they’re going to do in the field, and then we thought, “What does it look like to immerse the fan in that very same position and give them a perspective of the game that they’ve never had?” But obviously, there’s a lot of red tape around doing business in the gaming category. So we ended up just pitching the NFL and NFLPA on this idea around taking the training product and gamifying it and making a consumer-facing product that allows fans to see what it’s like to be their favorite player. After years of negotiating and working around that deal, we were able to secure the rights.

As a whole, what we’ve done is build an ecosystem utilizing VR technology and player data, and the idea is to build an authentic simulation product that allows players to be able to simulate reps, virtually practice to prepare for games, and allow fans to see a gamified version of that in NFL PRO ERA from the perspective of the player.

Just giving that experience, democratizing that experience as a company, we say we’re democratizing athleticism. So when you’re in our products, everyone feels like an athlete. That is the goal, and we feel like NFL PRO ERA is the beginning of that as we look to expand that in the future years.

TJ: Yeah. We have several teams using the training product today. It’s the way that they simulate reps against holograms, and it’s also morphed into the way that they practice virtually. When COVID hit, players weren’t in the facilities the way that they traditionally were and teams were turning to the product that actually allows them to simulate reps. Literally, teams right now, we have a player in California, a player here in Florida—they can get in the headset with their coach controlling the desktop application, showing them a play, communicating with them. It’s really just become an extension of the practice facility and allows them to scale that outside of the facility.

TJ: When Hawk and I first partnered, we were thinking about this. What was our passion? What was the mission? What were we trying to accomplish? And it’s two former athletes that loved what our experiences in sports taught us in life, not even just in playing. We’re just sharing the experience with the world.

There’s a very small percentage of people that play football at a high level in college that then play professionally. And when you talk to people who have, which a significant portion of our team has, you literally spend the rest of your life, when you stop playing, just telling stories of when you played, right? So instead of telling those stories, how do we show people that experience and share that? And that’s something that we think the fans would want and we thought the industry was turning in that direction.

When you look at the media today, you see a lot of athletes talking about their experience, telling their stories, and that’s what fans want. They want to hear it from the athletes. And the next step of that in our perspective is, “Okay, it’s one thing to hear it. Now, what is it like to experience it?” And I think NFL PRO ERA is the beginning of that. When you think about the immersive stadiums, when you think about finally seeing how difficult it is to be the quarterback, I think that’s going to start to allow fans to say, “Okay, this is what an elite NFL QB is seeing and processing in real time. This is how quickly I need to make that decision. These are how big and how fast these guys are.” And it just really starts to embody the fun aspects of the game, but even the more difficult aspects of the positions as well.

We make sure all of the teams get into this, balancing the authenticity of what it’s like to be in those players’ shoes with the fun aspects of it so people can enjoy it. But it’s the feeling that you get that you remember from your time as an athlete, right? What is it like when you’re in that stadium? What is it like to be with your teammates? What is it like to score touchdowns, complete passes, throw interceptions? That’s what we want to make sure that we convey and allow and share with the world.

So when we say “democratizing athleticism,” it’s all those elements of what it feels like, and then again, coupled with the team, we’re really drilling into, “Okay, how do we make that fun? How do we give the industry what they want and what they’re used to, but then taking it to the next level due to VR technology and this perspective of the athlete?”

TJ: I think we’ve been very intentional about StatusPRO as a whole about just combining different subject matter experts to just make sure that we give the best product that we can to the consumer. They’ll go into their background, but Barnes has done this for a long time for a lot of different companies. There’s his experience in gaming, and then with my and Hawk’s background just working in sports, the business side of sports, all three of us being athletes, we were able to just communicate in an effective way that ultimately gives the player an experience that embodies everyone’s perspective wrapped into one product, right?

Like anything, it’s very healthy, good conversation, challenging conversations at times, but I think the ultimate thing you’re going to see in all of our products starting with NFL PRO ERA is just a unique blend of everything you’ve seen traditionally in sports gaming, but also this new aspect and perspective of the player that’s like nothing that you’ve ever seen. I’m really excited about that.

And I’m excited about the team that we built. Like I said, they come from a lot of different places. They’ll go into their backgrounds here. And I just want people to know that we’re excited, and we’re here to stay. This is the first game of many, and we want to hear your feedback. Please let us know what you’re interested in—how can we make it better? And know that you have people that are passionate about the space, trying to solve for it.

Jay Juno (Executive Producer): Like Troy mentioned, we’re all long-time video game entertainment industry professionals. I’ve worked for many of the major publishers like Microsoft, Nintendo, EA, Activision, and THQ—I may be missing one—from various job titles from creative and art, here to executive producer. Before this, though, I took a break from games. I spent five years as Director of Developer Relations at Magic Leap, and we were working on some sports there, not in VR, but in AR.

When I met Troy at Magic Leap, he showed me the original training demo and I thought, “If you’re going to make a game, this is going to be pretty awesome.” Sure enough, he decided to make a game. He hit me up a few years ago, and I’ve been helping out ever since.

Jason Barnes (Creative Director): I go by Barnes. I’m the Creative Director for the studio and our focus on NFL PRO ERA.Like Jay said and Troy alluded to, I’ve been at this since 1996 with Midway, EA, Microsoft, and even did some time making some toys and video games and worked at Universal Studios for some interactions for roller coasters and things like that also. Former college basketball player, passion for sports, passion for football. Very excited about this team and this game that we’re making.

Derrick Levy (Director of AI and Gameplay): I come from a lot of the same circles as Jay and Barnes. We worked together at EA over a decade ago and ended up working together again. StatusPRO was my third sports gaming company. At EA, I worked at a company called Quick Hit doing Quick Hit Football, an online football game. I worked at Magic Leap with Jay for a little over five years, and that connection brought us all together here at StatusPRO.

Always been a big fan of sports. Even before I started working at EA, I was a big Madden player on the Sega Genesis. It was my favorite game on the Genesis, and actually my first gig out of grad school where I did video game development was at EA, working on Madden. It was kind of like a dream come true. I worked there for about five years—went through the trenches with these guys on the Xbox 360 launch title, which is a trial by fire, and I’ve always had an interest in games. Football certainly is one of my favorites. And when I heard these guys were making a VR football game, I was like, “Yeah, sign me up!”

JJ: Where do you even begin? I guess the hardest thing for sure was making sure we could get the license from the NFL. I think a big part of that process was us being able to continually show improvement to the game and that we would represent the NFL in a very good way. As far as your other question about how we actually made this, it was a bit like putting a car together while it’s driving—as we’re trying to assemble bits and pieces of the game and work with the NFL and the Players Association and everybody else. It’s kind of a little bit like this on how the game flow went, but once everything was locked in, I think we made tremendous progress moving forward. And that’s where we are now, getting close to launch.

DL: It’s a lot harder [laughs].

JJ: In most sports games now, you can do everything. You’re the pitcher and you throw the ball, it gets hit, then you turn into the third baseman who throws it over the first base. That’s not realistic. I mean, the graphics might be great, but from a player’s point of view it isn’t realistic. That’s playing from God mode, whereas the goal here is, you are the quarterback. In some ways, it simplifies things because guess what? Now I’m not responsible for putting the team together. I’m not responsible for running the ball necessarily except for scrambling. I don’t call all the plays since a real quarterback never calls the plays. The play is called in and sometimes you get to pick an audible if it’s needed.

It allowed us to be super focused on that one thing: “What is it like to not just be in the head of a quarterback, but to be the quarterback?” Because now you’re making the throws, making the reads, making all those things. It’s harder in a way because our brains and eyes know exactly what reality is, but when you simplify it down to that one piece of, “You are the quarterback, not the GM, not the coach, not anything else,” then it allows you to focus on that better.

JB: From an on-field perspective, we work off design principles, like passing has to feel great. We have goals. We want to reward the player for doing the right thing while also being true to an authentic NFL experience. I think a big part of that is, what I talked about when we approach you from the game design, like Jay said, working in sports, I’ve worked in non-sports, there’s always this different challenge and I respect every type of game out there and the design challenges that go with them. But people know what our sport looks like.

Our approach with it from the simulation standpoint is that it’s intense from this perspective. I think not being in the God mode like Jay said but being actually in—there’s a low level of size, that I think you said about the stadium, the players. But there’s this level of intensity. When we make games, we have multiple audiences. Certain people gravitate towards different game modes and different things like that, but I think with this being the first VR, truly NFL-licensed sports game, we’re going to have a couple of different audiences within that initially which are new to VR, whether you’re a hardcore football fan or not, and you have some casual players.

We’ve actually attempted to balance the game on the easier modes. You’ll have success and you’ll still feel like the quarterback, but you can actually increase the game speed to more of a realistic speed and more authenticity because we also know with sports games, you’re not going to play this once. You’re going to play a full season. You’re probably going to play multiple seasons. You’re going to play hundreds of games. A big part of that is making sure that you can feel challenged at the different game speeds and the different difficulties, and we tuned it and balanced that way.

The other thing with sports games that I was talking about is there’s context and variety. And so, in sports games, you really need to see your animations to make sense. Always having that context, that you are controlling the quarterback but you have 11 AI opponents and 10 AI teammates. They better look smart out there with you when you’re playing with them—which is not an easy thing by any means. And you know, I always tell the team to be proud of what we’re going to launch, but don’t ever be satisfied because we can always, always make it better, especially sports games. It’s a never-ending fun challenge.

DL: Sports games have a unique challenge in that there are examples of what real-life looks like—you can turn on your TV on Sunday and watch 12 games. Like, okay, this is how real football looks. This is part of reality that people are very familiar with. People know what football is supposed to look like. They’ve played it. They see it. They’ve watched it, probably hundreds of hours of football. We, as a video game, we’re trying to simulate that. But obviously, we’re not, even technically, at the point where we can simulate reality 100%. The technology just isn’t there yet.

We try to achieve that parity as much as possible where it counts. Like to Barnes’s point, you are the player, but now there are 21 other AI-driven players on the team that need to be doing sensible things that look like football. It’s not easy. The defense needs to look like they’re doing something smart. Your offense needs to look like they’re doing something smart, and if they don’t, it’s very obvious to people like, oh, that’s not a football play.

So there’s a high bar we have to meet for visuals, for gameplay, for performance. I think the ability to do that comes from more depth of experience. We’ve done this. We resolved the same problems many times, like the same problems that we’ve solved in Madden ’06 and Barnes solved in Madden for PS2 are the same problems we have to solve here like blocking, catching, and so on. We know how to do this, and that’s what gave us the leg up. We’ve done this before. But to Barnes’s point, we are doing it already but there’s always more we can do—there’s more reality, more realism. We can add better performance to make it feel more realistic.

But I think what we’ve put together for this year is really good for somebody who’s never been a quarterback. You’re launched into this first-person view in a giant NFL stadium and giant guys are running at you. I mean, it’s plenty. There’s plenty going on that you want to see a lot of this. Just get the ball off before you get hit!

JB: That’s a great question because there’s a couple of things in the interior example about the pass. When you’re a quarterback, you make reads and Troy kind of talked about this. You have progression, and you always hear it when announcers talk about how Tom Brady sees everybody. Patrick Mahomes, too, those guys can see everybody. But rookie guys have trouble. Sometimes they don’t get past their first read or their second read.

That’s the way you want to approach it, being a quarterback here when you are turning and looking and doing a realistic throwing motion but also coming back to knowing your intent. You’re looking at the accuracy, you’re making an out route. We know where you want to put the ball for the most part.

And so, part of that, and the context, there’s a couple of things. One is when I pass the ball in real life, if you and I were to play catch out on the street or whatever, when I throw it, I’ve always had a vision of how I want you to catch it. If we’re doing a toe tap on the streets over to the sidewalk for fun, I know how I envision you catching it, and that’s the way we approach our animation, our motion captures, is we ran specific routes, we did specific things, and I’m literally tuning things to help with that realism and to help with that part of it.

JJ: One of the things I think that we found really interesting with that is you have this big stadium around you, but you also have 21 other players that are moving. As you’re moving, you’re actually watching other players. You’re very, very rarely just looking into blank space or a flat space. That’s where I noticed discomfort usually got triggered when we first started building this game—it wasn’t like these big stadiums or anything like that.

What I had to do is look down at the field and then move your head and that got me every time because I’m just looking at a green thing. There is no context for me, for my brain to pay attention to. I do notice sometimes people will get a little bit of discomfort within our mini-games where it’s just you throwing targets and using the thumb sticks.

We also have an alternate locomotion mechanic where you can pump your fists while holding the grip buttons. That seems to help some people as opposed to using the thumb stick.

Barnes talked about the bullet time too. We know one thing that you do not want to do is force movement. So with the slow motion when you hike the ball, even though we’re putting you on a rail briefly, because you’re paying attention to so many other things where you’ve got that objective, that seems to not make you uncomfortable in a way that maybe some other similar games would.

JB: On the sideline, there’s a couple things that we offer there. You can simulate when your team is on defense into your next possession. We have a tablet you’re holding, and the tablet offers some features like simulating the next possession. But what we typically do is if the other teams get a punt, we have your offensive coordinator in your ear like a real quarterback calling out the play and setting it up.

And so, we can simulate up to the punt or the kickoff, and the idea is again to be contextual. The idea is that if you get the ball back with just 30 seconds and you need a field goal to tie the game, there’s some awareness and context to that. But that’s either whether you simulate or if you actually watch the action on the field because you want to see the gameplay play out. You can look at your previous drive. There, on the tablet, you can look at the plays. NFL games feature tablets, players are looking at photos or looking at different things from previous drives, and we started down that route with this so you can see what plays worked or how you scored on your last drive or if it didn’t work, if you threw an interception or punted the ball.

Then we have your sideline team behind you and referees on the opposite sides of the field, and we have a scoreboard that shows first down or touchdown or field goal, kind of trying to just give life throughout the entire experience. A big part of that is even post-play. A big part of that is making an AI assignment driven so that if you do get a first down, the defense might react that they’re disappointed that they gave up the first down, or if your opponent does an incomplete pass, you see your team doing things like celebrating to give it life. Again, we want you to feel like you’re actually not out there with a bunch of AI robots. We want you to feel like you’re out there with NFL players.

DL: To Barnes’s point, the emotions that we play and exhibit after each play—the defense will celebrate at the minute but they’ll be disappointed in the first down, while the offense will celebrate a first down. At some points, especially during tense moments in the game’s situation, it’s fun watching the AI play on the sideline. We have an internal test mode where we can just have the AI play each other. I actually enjoy watching the AI play because it looks like a real game. They’re usually showing emotion, the guys are pumped up they got a first down, the defense is celebrating, batting down a pass. There’s a lot of stuff on-field that even if you’re on the sidelines watching, especially the late-game situations, you want to see how it plays out.

JB: Yeah, we have an AI vs. AI game, where we spend a lot of time not in a headset, just watching the animations, watching the AI, looking at the assignments. “Where’s the blocker, this left tackle, who is he looking at? Is he looking at the right person to pick up the deep zone?” We have all that kind of debug information, and daily, we have a game plan animation meeting with a bunch of us where we talk about what we’re working on, what we saw. The other part of it is, we have healthy debate and I’ll say, “Hey, Derrick, you’re killing me here with this blocking.” Then he’ll come back, maybe I’m seeing this catch animation, it’s playing at the wrong time. We have so many eyes that are looking at things wanting to make it better.

That just doesn’t go from gameplay but that goes into other modes, it goes into the season, the locker room, the feeling that it’s your own locker, that kind of part of it and winning your trophies. We have a nice game loop of single-game trophies like one for throwing three touchdowns, and then we have seasonal and career trophies, and every NFL team you beat, we unlock their football. You’re filling up this trophy room as part of the experience.

DL: I think where the metagame is pretty impressive, I mean look at all the achievements and all the things that you can play to earn. You’ll be kept busy for a very long time. I think we have one achievement that was for accruing 10,000 passing yards.

JJ: At launch, you can create rooms both public and private of up to eight people. We call it the sandbox, but it’s an NFL stadium. You get to choose which stadium you want, but there aren’t any rules there. I mean, there are targets to throw at, you can play catch with each other, there’s voice chat, but it’s more just open—that’s why we call it the sandbox. You can do whatever you want in there really.

Then inside of that sandbox, lobby, whatever you want to call it, there’s a menu where you can have that same group of up to eight people play three mini-games. There’s a traditional throwing game like they used to do in the Pro Bowl, we’ve got a dodgeball game, and then a boss battle game where one player’s huge and everyone else throws footballs at that player.

They’re more like quick kind of snack-sized gaming experiences that you can do with your friends. That’s going to be an area that will grow. We’ll continue to make more mini-games in the future, but we started out relatively small—it’s still fun though. Early on before NFL PRO ERA really started, we had a demo that was a bunch of small mini-games, and we would sometimes have meetings there, even doing some interviews out of it.

JJ: We started developing this game thinking a lot of things from the training app were going to drive the commercial product. Things are starting to go the other way around now. A lot of the AI and logic that we’ve made for the game we’re moving into the training product to go away from just purely on rails.

JB: I think there’s a couple points going back to season mode and the season mode offensive coordinator. Another feature is we have a whiteboard in there, and each team that you’re playing, we have keys to the game. That’s inspired from some old video games on the Sega Genesis, but the idea is that each team, we’re hoping to give you a little bit of insight into just who to look for defensively, kind of who might be coming off the edge and things like that.

Part of the play calling we’re doing on the wrist. We’re doing it like a real QB from that perspective, offensive coordinator calling, you can audible at the line of scrimmage. But a lot of the feedback we’ve had has been very positive from that experience, from allowing you to feel like a QB and get the play in, get to the line, and make the read. That’s been great.

We also have a two-minute drill mode, which is our kind of arcade-style option. Everything is still 11-on-11 and simulation-style, but it’s now just about scoring as many points as you can. We start you at the 10-yard line with two minutes left on the clock. You can play any team that you want and every completion, every yard gained, every touchdown has scores go over the player’s head with points racking up.

Once you score a touchdown, we move you back so you now go back five or 10 yards. Then if you score on that touchdown, we move you back even more. And we have leaderboards related to that, encouraging you to score as much as you can in this bite-sized arcade mode. Maybe you don’t have time for a full season game and you just want to get in for a little bit. It’s still 11-on-11, guys are still rushing at you, but it’s fun and quicker.

DL: The only thing I would say is that we just barely scratch the surface with NFL Pro Era. There’s so much more that got left out on the cutting room floor that we just couldn’t squeeze them in. We’ve got more fidelity, more action, more realism, just more stuff to add. We hope you enjoy it, and there’s a lot more to come.