It felt awkward, agonising even, to spend that amount of time on a single menu just to listen to some music, battling the obligation to Just Get On With The Game. For all its merits, The Hoosiers’ Goodbye Mr A zaps me back to the embarrassing time I thought bootlegging the entire FIFA 06 soundtrack would be a cool thing to do. Stumbling across one of those tracks is like getting a whiff of a smell you thought you’d forgotten – powerful, with a faint mustiness, and not entirely pleasant. That relentless pursuit of the new means FIFA also plays a big part in shaping the nostalgia of tomorrow. Schnur is keen to point out that the game’s playlists are not ‘Steve and Cybele’s Greatest Hits’, but over the years, the soundtracks do bear resemblance to a title like NOW compilation series: a group of ‘hot right now’ tracks are sealed off in their own time capsule once they reach their sell-by date, to be replaced by a newer, shinier edition. We don’t ever pay attention to what was, we pay attention to what will be, and we take very seriously the responsibility of shepherding people there and turning players on to things they don’t know yet.” Where older music lovers might bond over the first albums they purchased, there’s now a number of generations who can do the same remembering the FIFA songs of their youth.ĭoes FIFA merely reflect music taste, or actively shape it? According to Schnur, it’s both, “and it possibly even nurtures it too. But despite the wide-ranging mix of styles, the game’s fans have turned it into a subgenre of itself, known simply as ‘FIFA Songs’. The programmers’ music policy has subtly shifted over the years too, from an indie rock infancy to its twenty-something prime that now incorporates an eclectic mix of EDM, grime and hip-hop. “We’re obsessed with the concept of music discovery,” says Steve Schnur, President of EA’s Music division. The ’22 announcement describes the game’s playlist as a ‘cultural mirror’, a phrase that downplays how committed the game’s programmers are to introducing listeners to new artists. “We’re like, ‘well, that’s kind of the point’.” “For years, whenever we would announce the bands that were going on FIFA, the most common feedback from users, games and kids was ‘I’ve never heard of a single one of these bands’,” says Cybele Pettus, the Senior Music Supervisor at EA. As tweaks to the gameplay become more minute and in-game features like Ultimate Team exhaust their capacity for reinvention, the annual playlist refresh has become a much-anticipated event in itself. Twenty-three years since EA Sports put Blur’s Song 2 on FIFA: Road to World Cup 1998, the background music that accompanies the in-game menus has slowly blossomed into one of the title’s key selling points. The history of FIFA ’s soundtrack is a study in ambience turned active.
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