Timothy Foster needed something to look forward to when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma last summer. The 35-year-old software developer, from upstate New York, knew he would have lots of time to kill while he recovered from his chemotherapy infusions, but what is there to do when you're laid up in bed all day? Yes, he had owned an NES and SNES in the '90s, but the last video game he had played in earnest was NCAA Football 14--a beloved 2013 college football simulator that was the final entry in a series that was discontinued following an arcane legal dispute between the powers that be in campus athletics and publisher EA Sports. But the landscape of college football has changed dramatically over the past few years, following a windfall of suddenly legal name, image, and likeness deals that freed up players to make money from outside sources. All this ultimately cleared a path for a revival of the one video game Foster ever truly loved.

To recruit good players in the new College Football 25 video game from EA Sports, you must be willing to engage in activities most adults would find odd. You will press a button to scour the social media of a high schooler. You will send a direct message to that high schooler. You will try to make that high schooler interested enough in you that they will accept when you offer to book them a visit to see you. Your significant other will think it's extremely weird that you stay up doing this until well after midnight.

Sports videogame releases are usually drab affairs. New versions come out every year, and beyond roster updates and a few gameplay tweaks, they don't change that much from edition to edition. But EA Sports College Football 25, which will be released worldwide on 19 July, isn't a typical game. It may well be the most anticipated sports video game release ever in the US. And to understand why, we need to go back to the beginning.

Fifteen years ago, former Nebraska and Arizona State quarterback Sam Keller filed a class-action lawsuit that in 2013 resulted in Electronic Arts Sports mothballing its popular College Football video game. The game featured players that did not have real-life names, but resembled every player on every roster in almost every other way. EA settled with Keller, et al., for 40 million, and the NCAA chipped in another 20 million. Sounds like a lot but payments to each player ranged from about 1,500 to 15,000. Keller, for his part, was flogged in the public square of social media for "ruining the video game for us."