In the American south, there’s nothing quite like college football. The sensation dominates weekend plans and has a place in the vast majority of southern homes. Fueling this was the NCAA Football video game series. After a long hiatus resulting from legal battles, the developers have announced a resurrection that brings joy to those of all ages.

The famed series has a long and surprisingly complicated history. Starting in 1993 with “Bill Walsh College Football,” the video game empire Electronic Arts seized an opportunity. From that point on, annual releases followed, slowly building into one of EA’s biggest franchises.

Despite the mounting success, trouble was on the horizon. Due to collegiate athletes not being paid employees, the developers could bypass expenses as other professional leagues would require. They seemingly worked around the issue by not using players’ real names, just their number and likeness in the character’s build.

However, lawsuits began to mount as former players claimed that they deserved monetary compensation for their likeness being used. This legal disaster led to EA halting new games in the series from being produced. This led to “NCAA Football 14” being the last game in the series, which has caused the game to skyrocket in resale value.

News broke Tuesday, though, that the famed series would be making a comeback. There had been a buzz surrounding the topic within the last year or so, as legislation was starting to pass across the country allowing collegiate athletes to benefit from things like likeness potentially.

Whether or not the new editions will include a realistic representation of current rosters is up in the air, but that isn’t much to worry about. Many fans of the game have been banding together, creating downloadable modifications that have been used to update the outdated 2013 release. These mods include updated rosters. As long as the official release doesn’t include outright likeness, EA can work around legal issues.

There is no official release date for the new game, but we know that it will be released for next-gen platforms: the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Waiting a year or so will be no problem, as they have been patiently awaiting this news for nearly a decade now. It’s safe to say this news was worth the wait.

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