Lacrosse game creator wants to take on EA’s Fifa

Carlo Sunseri thinks Lacrosse is the “sickest sport ever”, and wants to make a game based on his sporting love that will challenge Fifa, Madden, and other AAA sports titles.

Sunseri has made previous Lacrosse games for mobile platforms – 10, to be precise – but his sights are now set on a AAA release for the Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.

In an effort to get the project off the ground, Sunseri started a campaign on IndieGoGo to raise $75,000. After the online fundraising ended, he had raised just over $157,000.

“The speed, the stick-work, the physicality: lacrosse inspires passion,” said Sunseri, who played the sport in high-school and college. During his final year of his tertiary studies, Sunseri founded a video game company so he could put Lacrosse games on the market.

“Look at what EA’s Fifa did for the sport of soccer in the U.S. That’s what I want our video games to do for lacrosse,” he said.

Lacrosse 15

“Even when we were playing the original PlayStation, I wondered why no one, EA in particular, had ever made a simulation lacrosse video game. It wasn’t until college that I really thought about the possibility of making a video game when Microsoft announced XNA and the Indie Game Channel.”

In college Sunseri approached a UK company for funding and built College Lacrosse 2010, and launched it on Xbox Indie Games channel.

“The response from those fans, starved of a video game representation of their sport, was tremendous. “That’s when I decided I would focus on producing lacrosse games full time,” he said.

His vision for the Fifa-beating game, titled Lacrosse 15, is to have “a multi-year dynasty mode, competitive online multiplayer, real-time RPG levelling, and in-depth character customisations”.

“I believe that lacrosse could go mainstream like football, baseball, or hockey,” he said.