“Do the developers even watch hockey?” is an insult that frustrated sports gamers often type on the Internet to express their dissatisfaction with the (lack of) authenticity in Electronic Arts' NHL video games.

The day-to-day realities of making sports video games, however, often require designers and producers to convey their gameplans to programmers who may not have much experience with the sport that their scripts are designed to simulate. This remains the case today, to a large extent. But as the tools and languages that companies use to make video games are becoming more standardized -- and are being widely taught to thousands of college kids -- the number of sports gaming programmers with relevant, real-life sports experience is on the rise.

The odds of finding a talented programmer who also happened to be a sports nut were much lower in the 1980s and 1990s, when making video games was a more esoteric process. “I’d never watched a hockey game; I didn’t know anything about it,” recalled Mark Lesser, the only programmer who's listed in the credits for SEGA Genesis sports classic, NHL 94. That cartridge's chief coder attended his first NHL game in 1993, during a staff-wide field trip. His Californian colleagues from EA talked like hockey experts, so Lesser just smiled a lot, kept nodding his head in agreement, and somehow walked out of the arena with his coworkers still convinced that he was the right man to code that year's game. Lesser then flew back home to Brooklin, Maine -- a tiny coastal town with a population under a thousand -- to finish crafting one of history's most fondly remembered hockey video games from his secluded cabin in the forest.

Long before he joined Electronic Arts, Lesser had earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from MIT, and had programmed two Atari 2600 carts: Frogger II: Threeedeep! and The Lord of The Rings: Journey To Rivendell. More famously, Lesser had designed the computer chips that powered Mattel's popular line of handheld LED toys, including "Auto Race," "Football," and "Baseball." But it was Lesser's experience creating SEGA Genesis games like Bimini Run and Swamp Thing that attracted Looking Glass Studios' co-founder, Paul Neurath. Looking Glass (then known as Blue Sky Productions) had been contracted to create John Madden Football 93 on the Genesis, but their staff lacked a programmer with extensive knowledge of SEGA's 16-bit system. Electronic Arts was impressed with Lesser's work on Madden 93, so the following year, EA hired him to program the next iteration of their pro hockey series. Lesser's partnership with the rising San Mateo, California company certainly benefited from having a solid codebase established by NHL Hockey and NHLPA Hockey 93, but nonetheless, it is interesting to know that the man who brought the “one-timer” into Electronic Arts' hockey franchise only got to see that shot performed in-person, by the pros, one time.

To learn more about Mark Lesser's unlikely career in video games, check out his interviews with Digital Press and Bangor Daily News.