It's In The Game - Madden NFL Football

 

Some of my fondest memories of playing video games as a kid involve Madden '94 on the Sega Genesis. John Madden's 16-bit voice saying "Boom! He'll remember that number." and "Quarterback can't hold the ball that long." will forever be etched in my mind. I would dominate games with Emmitt Smith and the Dallas Cowboys. Once the Madden games got the franchise feature, I had two multi-season franchises on the PS2, one with the Bengals and one with the Saints. By the time the PS3 era arrived, however, I was playing video games less and less, and the Madden games were becoming more and more complex, and so I stopped playing them. I haven't had a Madden game since the PS3. However, because of my history with the game, I was intrigued by this show on Amazon about its history.

Madden NFL football has been around so long and has become such a gaming institution that you don't often stop to think how odd it is that the cover star is a coach. Actually, by the time Madden was on the cover of his game he had retired from coaching and moved to the broadcast booth. That is even more weird. The person who developed the game had been obsessed with making a football game since his childhood, and wanted someone associated with the game to be knowledgeable about football so that he could provide input. He was a fan of John and thus that is how Madden became associated with the game. I started playing Madden in 1992, and the game itself first appeared just a few years earlier. It is amazing to see footage of the earlier games and how simple they were. The first version didn't even feature 11 vs 11 players (an aspect of the game that John famously rejected), nor did it have real players or teams. Those were added by the time I was playing the game, however, and so was the football itself (apparently that also was not present in earlier versions of the game).

As players were added, there was a big focus on player ratings. Who was rated best overall, fastest, etc. This was discussed on sports news and among players themselves, sparking debate. Eventually they replaced Madden on the cover of the game with actual players, and the Madden curse became a thing. These are just a few examples of how the game transcends the video game world into the real world. There are other examples as well, such as the Madden Bowl, but the point is that the game became huge, affecting an entire generation of kids.

Like I said above, I haven't played a Madden game in over a decade, but I spent a lot of time in the past playing different versions of the game and remember it well. This 4 part miniseries explored the history of the game as well as what it takes to make the current game, and was generally interesting from a nostalgia perspective. I particularly enjoyed the parts from the 1980s and 1990s, dealing with competition from Sony on the PS1 and 2K sports, and the entire story about reverse-engineering a Sega Genesis to create Joe Montana football was fascinating. John Madden will never be a football player or coach to me. I somewhat remember him as a broadcaster, but more than anything, I'll remember John Madden as a video game icon.