Chatting With Matt10 About All Things Sliders

In the third edition of our Community Spotlight feature, I’m so happy Matt10 agreed to have an extended chat with me. You might know Matt and the crew he works with from a variety of sports games. He’s a slider obsessive who helps breathe life into games like EA FC, Madden, and College Football.

He also has the same roots as me coming from MaddenMania way back in the day before hopping on over to OS, so we have a lot of shared DNA. It’s one of the many reasons I was stoked to chat with him.

Matt goes into a ton of depth about his history with sports games, what these games are doing right and wrong these days, when updates are coming for the various slider sets, and we chat about what the best way forward is for EA’s games.

The care and time many OSers put into sports games is incredible, and it’s why I wanted to start doing this interview series with OS members. I wanted to give them a platform in the premium Wednesday newsletter to talk with other super hardcore OSers in our little circle of trust, basically treating it like an extension of the Supporters Forum (if you know you know, as they say).

The inaugural version was my chat with studbucket, who on top of being supremely helpful and genuine, has the long-running Bulgarian Brothers dynasty write-up. I then spoke with marshdaddy to talk about his long-running NBA 2K franchise and also showcase some tools he was working on to get more realism out of NBA 2K’s MyNBA.

If you want to read those newsletters, you can do so with the free trial, no matter whether you have done the 30-day free trial in the past or not.

If you want to hang with your fellow OSers, here’s your weekly reminder to also join the OS Discord if you want to chat with me or others from the community. If you sign-up for the premium newsletter, send a direct message to either Rob S (thekernelpop) or ChaseB (chucklesbiscotti) on Discord, and either one of us will add you to the extra Supporters area on Discord, and we have a snazzy role and badge to give you on there, too.

With that said, let’s get right into this interview with Matt.

OS: Matt, you've been a member of OS since April 2006. Do you remember why you first signed up on OS? 

Matt: I joined mainly because I was looking for another place to post my franchise reports. I had been posting on MaddenMania before that, and I just wanted to stay accountable to keeping my franchise going. I think at the time I was running with the Chiefs on Madden 07, then the Giants on a re-rated roster, and the Giants again on NFL 2K5.

I was really proud of my reports, but my favorite was my BYU dynasty report because it was right around the time I had just started dating my now wife — and the feedback I had gotten from the BYU report was really positive, not to mention I also had just met her parents for the first time!

Do you want to give a backstory on your history with sports video games and how you got into them?

Yeah, it started where I was born, in Indonesia. My mother is the oldest of 12 brothers and sisters, so I had a lot of uncles who were at different ages. They introduced me to not only playing soccer/football, but also FIFA 97 on the original PlayStation. Keep in mind, every game in Indonesia is a pirated copy. I could only play NTSC games, not PAL or NTSC-J games, so my selection was a lot more limited where I could play FIFA or Winning Eleven games. So the best game for me was made by Konami, which was Goal Storm ‘97.

It was so memorable because my copy of this game was pirated — but also used — and so scratched up that I could never get past the opening PlayStation screen. It got to the point that I developed an issue with my vision where I’d close my eyes half-way, kind of half-peeking at the screen, just praying the game would load. So when the game finally loaded past that screen, it was the most amazing feeling. I cherished it so much and never wanted to turn off my console, but I definitely developed an issue with random eye movement later on in life from the ordeal.

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