Quinn Ewers is among the legions of sports fans who will rejoice over a subtle change when the first new college football video game in more than a decade debuts this week.
Ewers will be able to play as himself rather than as an unnamed 6-foot-2-inch athlete with strikingly similar features who also wears a No. 3 orange-and-white jersey.
“As far back as I can remember, I was always trying to create myself and always playing for the Longhorns,” said Ewers, the starting quarterback for the University of Texas.
A primary reason many fans buy a new version of the same sports video game every year is to play with updated team rosters, ones filled with offseason acquisitions and unbridled optimism. But to comply with amateurism rules, college sports titles like the popular N.C.A.A. Football franchise long had to fill those rosters with thinly veiled stand-ins.
That practice came under fire as the push to pay college athletes gained steam, drawing lawsuits that shelved the series after N.C.A.A. Football 14. But the landscape has undergone seismic shifts, and players can now be paid for the use of their name, image and likeness.
When the rebranded EA Sports College Football 25 is released this week, it will contain more than 11,000 real-life players.
Building the rosters for every Division I team from scratch was a technical challenge for EA Sports, a studio at Electronic Arts that created a machine learning tool to build player likenesses and spent more than $6 million to secure athlete participation. Each player who opted in and was ultimately included — whether Heisman Trophy favorite or third-string guard — is receiving $600 and a deluxe edition of the game (retail value $100).
At least 100 college athletes — including the three on the cover, Ewers, Michigan running back Donovan Edwards and Travis Hunter, a wide receiver and cornerback for Colorado — were offered additional money to promote the game on social media, said Sean O’Brien, who runs strategic partnerships at EA Sports. (The game’s standard edition costs $70.)
To reach the young athletes who did not immediately respond to inquiries through their university email addresses, the commercial rights company One Team Partners slid into their Instagram inboxes, called their mothers and video conferenced into team meetings.
In the end, more than 14,000 athletes gave their consent to be included, though the game will feature fewer — roughly 85 players from all 134 teams. They signed up via an app and will be paid out directly into their bank accounts this summer.
“Ninety-plus percent of these athletes will never have an N.I.L. opportunity” aside from this one, O’Brien said. “And the fact that they can be in a video game is just cool.”
About five years ago, EA Sports began building an internal team that could develop a new version of its college football game once the broader licensing issues were resolved. There was no question the company would return to college sports, said Cam Weber, the president of EA Sports, which also makes the Madden and FC franchises.
“It was just a matter of when,” he said.
With its rich history and intense rivalries, college football generates particularly intense passion that can border on religious fervor. Service members pour themselves into the pageantry of the annual Army-Navy game. Michigan and Ohio State alums rarely judge a season successful unless their team vanquishes its rival.
And unlike the National Football League, college teams use an array of offensive schemes that can be particularly fun to emulate in a video game.
“Running the read-option was always fun back in 2014, because it was hard to stop,” said Hunter, the two-way Colorado star. “Get a fast quarterback and fast running back. Marcus Mariota on Oregon and those guys in it were crazy.”
In the interregnum between college football video games, some dedicated fans have been manually updating the rosters of N.C.A.A. Football 14, carefully crafting each avatar to mimic a real player’s height, weight, appearance and skill. To make accurate rosters for EA Sports College Football 25, professional developers had to dig even deeper, contacting each and every player from Air Force to Wyoming.
Brig Hartson, who walked on to the Colorado State roster, has filled in as a quarterback, running back, wide receiver and tight end in practice but has never appeared in a game.
Yet after a morning workout last month, Hartson got an email saying he would be included in EA Sports College Football. He immediately called his siblings and high school coach to tell them the good news.
“I may not be at C.S.U. forever, but I will always have that,” he said of being in a video game. “That’s one of those things that lasts forever.”
O’Brien said every team’s roster should be “close to 100 percent” by the end of August. Officials said that they did not believe that any notable players decided to forgo the money they were offered, but that some were quicker to sign up than others.
“I think there was some digestion of: ‘If I make a couple million bucks to play football, I’m going to make $600 to be in a video game? It just doesn’t add up,’” O’Brien said.
ESPN had reported in March that Arch Manning, Ewers’s backup at Texas and part of one of football’s most famous families, would not participate; he posted a video on social media last week saying he would be included.
Although the ability to customize player names and attributes will exist in some modes, gamers will be prevented from creating specific players who have not opted in.
“We’re making sure that you can edit some things, but not all things to make an exact copy,” said Daryl Holt, the general manager in charge of American football at EA Sports.
The studio knew it would not be possible to bring thousands of college football players into a motion-capture facility as is often done for Madden, its N.F.L. title. Instead a machine learning tool used artificial intelligence to build a likeness of each player based on his official college photo, with designers later making tweaks by hand.
Electronics Arts executives have emphasized that the gameplay for College Football will feel different from what longtime Madden players are used to. It will be faster, twitchier and more unpredictable, they said.
“The range of talent on the field is a much wider gap in college than the pros,” said Seann Graddy, an EA Sports vice president who worked on several versions of the game as far back as 2009. “We try to translate that into the game, and when you do, you get bigger plays.”
For many fans of the game, any college football at all is an oasis.
Chris Hawkins, 42, of Carmel, Ind., bought each new version for years, playing on a Sega Genesis and eventually on a PlayStation 3. “When I have a rough day, I still fire up N.C.A.A.,” he said.
A lifelong Indiana fan, he would light up the scoreboard by running the option with a generic approximation of the quarterback Antwaan Randle El against friends playing as Drew Brees with Purdue’s air raid offense. Later, in graduate school at Florida State, Hawkins and a half-dozen classmates played through a season together, each adopting a team in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Hawkins still plays an old version of N.C.A.A. Football that he keeps current by downloading new sets of rosters with actual player names. In his dynasty mode, it is the year 2041.
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