This is a historic year for the Madden franchise. The series is celebrating its 30th anniversary, made a return to PC gaming, and introduced the real player motion system. In Madden 19 you can destroy secondaries with Antonio Brown, terrorize offenses with Luke Kuechly, and dominate with Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski on the same team.

However, if you look a little deeper throughout the rosters you may stumble on Seahawks rookie Shaquem Griffin. While his modest 72 overall might not jump out at you, his origin story and appearance make him the most unique player in the history of the Madden series.

Shaquem Griffin was always on EA’s radar.

Griffin is a special linebacker. He overcame losing his left hand at 4 years old to a prenatal condition and turned that into balling out at UCF. Behind the senior leadership of Griffin, the Knights went undefeated in 2017 and earned the right to spark a national championship debate with Alabama (they did win the SB Nation mascot championship for what it’s worth).

While Griffin was making a name of himself at UCF, he was catching the attention of an Electronic Arts Orlando office less than 20 miles away. Griffin’s stardom stood out among producer Ben Haumiller and the rest of the office.

“The story of Shaquem Griffin didn’t come as a surprise to us since we’re right here,” Haumiller told SB Nation. “We were following along just as fans and we have a bunch of people on the team who went to UCF.”

At first Griffin was someone the Madden crew had on their radar, but they didn’t know what Griffin’s chances were for making an NFL team. Yes, Griffin was a boss at UCF, but his draft status was unclear. That all changed when he received a late invite to the NFL Combine — and put on a damn show. Griffin ran a blazing 4.38 40-yard-dash, pushed 20 reps on the 225-pound bench press and impressed the NFL world. Griffin was later drafted in the fifth round by the Seattle Seahawks, where he would join his twin brother, Shaquill.

Every year, Madden sends a few people to the combine to face scan the rookies for its game because they’re all in one place at the same time. When they saw Griffin’s combine performance, it all but confirmed that this was something they would need to prepare for.

“It went from the potential of him getting drafted and getting a shot to ‘he’s going to get a shot,’” said Haumiller.

The combine signaled to the Madden team that it was time to work on Griffin’s asset.

When senior modeler Greg Watson got word of Griffin’s combine performance, he knew it was time to start the artistic process.

“I actually started as an artist looking at reference material and thinking about ways before I was even asked about the implementation of the asset,” Watson said.

Here’s what he means by asset. You know how in ‘Edit player’ you can switch gloves seamlessly? That’s because the gloves are a separate asset from the rest of the arm.

Griffin’s appearance presented a new kind of challenge for the team. For Watson, who has been working at EA since 2005, Griffin’s arm would turn into the most unique asset he’s made. He’s made special shooting sleeves for Richard Sherman and things of that nature, but nothing like this.

At first the Madden development team thought they could just edit an existing asset so that one of the glove hands would just be missing. However, when they tested this method out, a situation arose.

Shadows.

When Watson discovered that the shadows didn’t properly reflect the arm, he knew that the team would have to try another approach.

“We were looking at this as a simple swap part, where we cut the model at the hands,” Watson said. “After getting into it we realized there was going to be an issue because we have a separate mesh that controls the shadow geometry.

“That wasn’t going to work because the shadow geometry would show fingers.”

“It actually ended up becoming a much larger task than we initially thought, so we had to make a full unique asset for him and then a different unique shadow geometry for that left hand,” he continued.

Here’s a full video of how they did the arm.

Here’s what’s different about Griffin’s character — and why.

One of the alluring parts of sports video games is the ability to customize damn near everything. Video games are also a way to satisfy our curiosity and play out scenarios.

If you wanted to put Stefon Diggs on the Jets or switch Russell Wilson to a running back for some reason, you can. There was a time in the Madden series where you could play Madden 2004 and make Michael Vick your punt and kick returner while he was still listed as a quarterback.

In the more recent Maddens, the depth chart capabilities have been altered to where you can’t make a substitution if it doesn’t make logical football sense. For example, you can’t put a tight end in at kicker or a linebacker at punt returner.

For Griffin, the restrictions go one step further. While most players’ positions can be changed in the edit player studio, you can’t change Griffin’s position. You can’t even switch him to another role on defense much less another linebacker position.

There are a bunch of content creators on YouTube who try “what if” scenarios on Madden; in these videos, they try to do their best to test and reach the very limits of the game itself. (They probably took inspiration from Breaking Madden.)

EA deduced that many gamers would try to test and see what Griffin can and can’t do within the confines of Madden and decided it was for the best that Griffin’s position remain locked. The team didn’t wan’t to risk people showing off Griffin, or the game, in a negative light.

Although they did this to mitigate this behavior, the possibility for awkward-looking gameplay will always be out there. Madden has made great strides in realness, but no game is perfect. There are glitches and bugs that show up occasionally and that’s just a tradition at this point.

The goal for Griffin’s entry in Madden 19 was to prioritize the accuracy of his appearance over how he corresponds with the gameplay. While the asset will not show a hand on his left side, certain animations and mechanics will still function as if a hand was there.

“We weren’t able to make an entire suite of animations specific for Shaquem,” said Haumiller. “So you will have situations where he goes for an interception and he might be catching it with what appears to be (a hand) floating in the air situation, or (if) he shifts hands as the ball carrier, it would look like where a hand would be.”

Yes, Griffin has one hand, but no one said he couldn’t catch. He had three interceptions in college and picked off Russell Wilson in training camp.

He can do all the things other NFL players can do, and the team wanted to make sure that the game properly reflected that even if a few animations look different at times.

“We wanted to do right by him and do our part in making sure he looks right, and then we’ll deal on our side with how it might look odd at certain times,” said Haumiller. “That was the important part to us: to always remain respectful of how he looks and how the arm is and not do something like ‘throw a glove on it’ and take the heat that way.”

Then it was time to test it out with the man himself.

The final step of the project was showing it to the man himself. Shaquem and his brother Shaquill were both able to play as themselves in Madden 19 in a video with ESPN. You can see just how excited he is to play as himself in Madden alongside his brother (they both played as the Seahawks):

Shaquill was in Madden 18 because he was a rookie last year, but for Shaquem it was his first time being in a video game.

I can’t confirm if they were in NCAA Football 14, due to EA not being able to discuss player likeness. Since they were both freshmen at the time, the game assigned them different numbers on the video game roster. Shaquill’s No. 10 belongs to a quarterback, and there’s no one on the roster with Shaquem’s No. 18. I did come across two freshmen on defense who have similar height and weight to the Griffin brothers. When you look at their locations, you can see that they’re not from the same place, but hometowns rarely matched real players anyway.

But they do look the same. Either way, this is the first time Shaquem Griffin has ever been accurately depicted in a video game.

Sports video games have come a long way. Gamers can recall a time of playing with 22 damn near identical sprites in John Madden Football or everyone shooting with the same jump shot form in NBA Live 2005. We’re now in an era where you can make your player look exactly like you and have a ton of creative choice in freedom.

EA went the extra mile to make sure Shaquem Griffin was properly depicted in the game. They chose to use this as an opportunity to celebrate and honor Griffin’s incredible story — and that’s awesome. Being able to bring reality into virtuality is one of the best parts of video games, especially when it’s done right.

I love video games, man.