The NFL Blitz and NHL Hitz series are undergoing some changes. Midway has made changes and additions to both NFL Blitz Pro and NHL Hitz Pro so that they're slightly more realistic interpretations of professional football and hockey respectively. NFL Blitz Pro will feature 11-on-11 gameplay as well as a more robust running game, while NHL Hitz Pro will have five-on-five play with actual NHL rules. We had a chance to speak with Jon Dean, vice president of sports development at Midway, to find out more about these games and the reason behind the company's decision to take a different approach with its latest line of sports games. Be sure to check out the first screenshots of NFL Blitz Pro and NHL Hitz Pro.

GameSpot: So tell us a little about the decision to take Midway's sports game in a slightly different direction.

Jon Dean: Well, what we're trying to do is move Midway Sports forward in terms of our consumer. We already have all the major sports licenses for basketball, football, and baseball. When we produced Slugfest last year it became the best-selling baseball game on the PlayStation 2, which is ultimately the highest consumer accolade we can have, and the key thing I want to underline is that we tried to be different with that product. The key for us was to come up with something that had credible baseball gameplay mechanics, but more so than the clinical execution of the game. It was more about trying to get the passion of baseball and make a game out of that--more like a highlight reel of the sport.

The phrase that we've coined at Midway to describe that was "better than real," so Slugfest was really the starting point of the changes we are making to our sports lineup. We started off by talking to consumers about our product. We've been publishing sports games for many years, and what we did was ask our consumers what they wanted from our games and where they wanted our games to go next--we also asked casual and hard-core gamers. We also looked at what GameSpot and various magazines were saying about our products, and we asked retailers what the customers were looking for. We listened to all of that, and the result is something that we consider pretty revolutionary in our lineup of sports games.

An example would be Blitz, which this year we are calling Blitz Pro. It's still Blitz, but the key thing is that we've made some changes to it. All the trademark Blitz features are there, all the things people love about Blitz are there--it's easy to pick up and play, and it's fast and hard hitting. But we added the things that consumers have been looking for. That means we've added 11-on-11, first-and-ten style of gameplay, as well as a deep franchise mode, and perhaps most importantly, online play for the PlayStation 2 version, which has a deep tournament mode. Blitz has always been a great multiplayer game, and it seemed like an obvious progression for us.

GS: Are these changes directly in response to players who wanted more realism from the Blitz series?

JD: If you look at our product over the years, it's always been a question of how to progress with it. We try to keep them very much arcade in style, but when we listened to the consumers they said give us a real game of football as opposed to something that's a parody of the game. We're trying to give them a game of Blitz but a game of Blitz that's 11-on-11 and first-and-ten--they'll still be getting that extreme experience, but it will be applied more to the real rules of football. It's football, and it's Blitz--it's not a clinical execution of the game, but it's more than just a game of football.

It's the same with Hitz. It's a great product for us and always has been well received. Again, looking at the next logical progression, our consumers were looking for five-on-five to take the game even further. We're also adding NHL rules as well as online play for the PlayStation 2 version.

GS: A few months ago, the NFL expressed concern in the way that the hits were portrayed in previous NFL Blitz games. Will we see the same over-the-top-style hits in NFL Blitz Pro, or have they been toned down?

JD: The timing of what we're doing here and the timing of the stories from the NFL is coincidental. We had already been doing this research for a number of years, trying to figure out what our consumers were looking for in the game, and we spent a couple of years of putting the changes for Blitz Pro together. Obviously, we work well with the NFL, and we work with them in trying to understand and respect what they need, but those stories were more concerned with the issues that the NFL had with itself as opposed to games. This is not a simulation, and this is not something meant to compete with sim games in the marketplace. We still see ourselves being positioned at the entertainment end of the football game marketplace, and we still have big hits, and the most hits out of any other game, but we want to make it appeal to someone who is a football fan but doesn't think that the game is a parody of the sport.