20 Years of Madden: A tale of trials, tribulations and Gordon Gekko capitalism

Madden 2009 is finally out and with it, Electronic Arts is celebrating Madden’s twentieth anniversary as the most successful and one of the longest running video game franchises in history. But Madden’s history is a tale of uphill battles against better, more innovative games, which it has triumphed over time and time again thanks to blitz marketing, industry manhandling, and the coup de grace, an exclusive NFL license. Let’s look back at all the good times.

1988: John Madden Football

This was the first game in the series. I never played it and know very little about it. According to Wikipedia, due to graphical limitations, there were only six players on the field per team. Let’s move on.

1989: The Japanese make one hell of a football game

Tecmo Bowl for the NES was the first popular football game franchise. The gameplay was simplistic and the original game lacked a real license but it was fun as hell. Tecmo Super Bowl for the Super NES added a real license and was even better than the original. Tecmo has gone on to make Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball, because they’re from Japan, and they can do whatever they wanted without being judged.

1993: Turns out people would rather play with real teams and player names

The Madden series’ greatest contribution to sports video games will be its use of a full league license. Madden ’94 was the first football game with real players and teams, and while this may seem a trivial detail, it made the game more engaging, more fun, but more importantly it opened the floodgates for sports fans who could finally play with their favorite teams. Players were no longer playing with a generic team from San Francisco in a generic football league, but were controlling Joe Montana and taking the 49ers to the Super Bowl. Electronic Arts and Madden are one of the main reasons video games are as popular as they are today.

Not to trivialize the Madden series, the Sega Genesis era marked the golden days for both the Madden series and EA Sports in general. Their games were the most fun, had the best graphics and sold the most. On a side note, NHL ’94 might still be the best sports game (and drinking game) ever.

1997: Gameday '98 makes the jump to polygons

More realistic than Madden, Sony’s NFL Gameday outsold Madden for three consecutive years, making it the only sports game in the US to dethrone Madden as best selling sports game. While Gameday ‘97 was a great game, ‘98 was not only the first 3D football game, it made an incredibly successful transition on its first try. The controls were tight, the animations lifelike and fluid, all while retaining its fun. Madden soon made the jump to 3D (though not as smoothly), adopted some of Gameday’s features and soon the Sony series began its decent into the abyss with less and less successful updates.

Late nineties: the Dark Ages

The late nineties were a dark age for the Madden games. Gameday was superior, while Madden was struggling to make the jump to 3D, with overly simplistic gameplay, bad motion capturing implementation (once a move was initiated you had to wait until the animation was completed for the next action to take place) and dumb as fuck or cheap as hell artificial intelligence. This is not to mention the money plays that especially plagued the game’s multiplayer. Still, Madden sold well (as always) and it was ultimately the lack of Madden that broke the camel’s back, and killed the Sega Saturn (the most underappreciated console in history).

1999: NFL 2K sets a new high water mark for sports games

NFL 2K was made from scratch by the relatively unknown Visual Concepts. It was a launch title for the new Sega Dreamcast. Madden wasn’t coming to the system so the stakes were high and chance of success low. But Visual Concepts killed it. NFL 2K was the true next gen football experience; even this year’s Madden ’09 is nothing more than a slightly more polished, prettier take on NFL 2K with new rosters.

NFL 2K revolutionized motion capture use, using an unprecedented 20,000 motion captured moves to created fluid, lifelike animation. The graphics were amazing, and coupled with the game’s TV quality presentation, the game could easily be mistaken for a television broadcast. The gameplay was the real draw, however. Amazingly responsive controls, a great physics and collision detection engine and truly realistic AI made this gaem the first realistic portrayal of football in a videogame. For the remainder of my days, NFL 2K will be the only time I hear the sounds two and kay muttered together without cringing.

2000: The rebirth of Madden

Electronic Arts put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into revitalizing the series. Madden 2001, for the Playstaion 2, was an excellent sports game, on par and perhaps superior in some respects to NFL 2K1 on the Dreamcast. The graphics were beautiful, controls and AI were massively overhauled and the production values set a new benchmark, even surpassing NFL 2K’s. The next few years would mark a bitter war between the two for best football (sports?) game.

2005: Electronic Arts gets exclusive NFL license

In 2005, Electronic Arts signed an exclusive licensing agreement (originally running through 2009, but now extended to 2012), making the Madden franchise the only video game with official player and team names. This was the final death blow to all of Madden’s remaining competition (basically Sega’s NFL 2K series). A sports game is useless without real player names (thanks to its game play, light years ahead of Fifa’s, Winning Eleven for the Playstation is the only example of a successful sports game franchise lacking a license).

Madden is now the only name left in town when it comes to football games. They could pack each copy with nothing more than John Madden’s air locked fart and it would still break a million copies.

Bonus! Link to the entire catalog of Next Generation covers

While I was perusing the internet for an image to put at the top of my essay on Next Gen, I came across this collection of magazine covers on Flickr. For those who are interested in a nice retrospective of the second half of gaming's golden age (ie. the nineties) seen through the eyes of Next Gen's editorial staff, CLICK HERE.

Next Generation (1995-2002)

Next Generation was a video game magazine ahead of its time (still ahead of its time?). If Electronic Gaming Monthly was Hello! Magazine, Next Generation was The New York Times Book Review. Next Generation tried to analyze where the video game industry was headed, why new games were important, and what new ground they broke – other than just cooler graphics and better controls.

Next Generation regularly drew parallels with other art forms and aspired to be more than just another video game magazine. It was printed on high gloss paper, had a very clean minimalist presentation and was the first video game magazine to run longform interviews and show half page and full page screenshots. It treated games as art and crafted its magazine to the highest standards; editorially, visually and physically.

Next Generation showed how video games could be art and it covered the burgeoning industry with intelligence and wit, even though it was easy to see how some may have regarded it as boring or snooty. Next Generation didn’t limit itself to basic questions about new characters, release dates, rumored projects and favorite pizza toppings when it interviewed game designers, programmers and executives. It asked where the industry was going. What they admired about other game developers. How their game was breaking new ground. In a column entitled “The Way Games Should Be”, game developers reflected on game design’s current state and where it needed to be taken.

It rated games on a five star scale, like one rates a movie or a music album. Five stars were awarded very rarely, only to games which approached perfection or broke important new ground. Metal Gear Solid was awarded five stars for setting a new high water mark in storytelling. Super Mario 64 received five stars for nearly perfecting the user controls and camera of 3D gaming, still in its infancy. Video game reviews are usually on a ten point scale, with one decimal point precision. This epitomizes the childishness of video game journalism, and the industry as a whole. Only a child would say he is seven and three quarters; and only a video game reviewer could give a game a 6.7.

Chuck Klosterman, writing for Esquire in 2006 (read it online), speculated that the reason video game critiques didn’t exist yet (at least in North America, maybe they do in Japan), was because video games, as interactive mediums, explore the consequences of free will and the myriad of potentialities that ensue. As he put it, what if Gone with the Wind ended differently for every person; with a bear attack, with Scarlett killing Rhett, or Rhett coming back inside the house (“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. Not!”). Video game criticism doesn’t exist because it can’t get started.

This is an important observation, but the reason video game criticism, and high brow video game journalism don’t exist is due to a more fundamental problem. Next Generation failed was because it served a very peculiar niche. It was an intelligent, high brow video game magazine. The problem was (still is?) that most video game players were in a state of perpetual adolescence (at least vis a vis videogames) and most intellectuals regard video games as nothing more than glorified, high tech board games.

The arguments put out to show video games as art do more harm than good. Journalists and company representatives quote the number of artists who worked on a game, how deep and complex a game’s storyline is or how beautifully composed its score is. These are all valid arguments as to why a video game may be considered artful but fail to illustrate the most important element of a video game’s art: the experience.

No one will deny that film is an art form. Many movies have beautiful scores, great storylines, and well written dialogue; but the distinguishing factor in a film’s art is the visual. A movie can express certain things through the camera’s lens better than any book, opera or painting. It is the same for video games.

Video games are virtual reality simulators. The term virtual reality simulation has a 1980’s tackiness to it that it will most likely never be able to quite shake off, but there exists no better term to describe a video game. Video games immerse the player in another world and allow him to experience things he could not normally experience in their totality or at least in certain aspects. The goal of art is to allow us to experience from the artist’s perspective; be it an emotion, a place, an event, and so forth. Video games serve the same purpose. And the mort artful video games allow us to experience all the intricacies of a certain experience. Much like art, the better video games make this experience both enjoyable and memorable.

skate (written with a lower case “s” to accentuate its alternativeness) is a skateboarding game released by one of the biggest video game publishers in the industry; Electronic Arts. It was released last year to glowing reviews and strong sales yet everyone missed the point as to why the game was so important. It was the first extreme sports game to forego a detached from reality arcade experience for a realistic simulation. The Tony Hawk series of games were incredibly fun but unrealistic and failed to get across the authentic experience of skateboarding. The goal of the game (and other copy cat extreme sports games) was to string dozens of tricks together in a combo chain where the score increased exponentially the longer the chain. In the final level of Tony Hawk 2, I managed to pull off a 2.4 million point combo; which is absurdly high compared to my first level combos in the one to two thousand point range. While this was incredibly fun, it failed to articulate the genuine experience of skateboarding, which is the patience and hard work of executing these tricks which were being chained together like a candy necklace; no regard for the individual elements and only a vague notion of what the whole resembles.

While there are point challenges in skate, that isn’t the game’s main focus. Instead, the game reverts to simplicity and is about completing complex tricks with style. When I first began playing, I could barely ollie (skateboard lingo for a jump) properly. Through patience and repetition (and wall punching), I slowly grew accustomed to the controls and began performing more complex tricks, ollying higher and chaining tricks together. This was all accomplished without leveling up my character, increasing the character’s abilities on a point based scale. In this sense, I was becoming a more talented skater in a more natural, lifelike way.

The real question is: Do hardcore gamers want to read this kind of analysis? It’s hard to say. Maybe because no one has offered this kind of analysis, gamers themselves don’t know if they want to read this sort of thing. An even more difficult question to answer is whether the casual, mainstream video game player wants to read this sort of thing? Many mainstream gamers play video games solely as a distraction, and hence are looking for art and refinement neither from their games nor from their video game journalism. But some casual gamers (like the very talented filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro who praises Silent Hill’s visuals and likens it to the work of David Lynch) might not only appreciate this sort of analysis, but look at video games in a new light.

Photo credits: Flickr, IGN