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Games

How John Madden Became the 'Larger-Than-Life' Face of a Gaming Empire (nytimes.com) 38

"[John] Madden, who died Tuesday, helped bring to life a series of football video games that have generated $7 billion in revenue since 1988," reports the New York Times. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report, written by Kellen Browning and Kevin Draper: Trip Hawkins first met John Madden in the dining car of an Amtrak train traveling from Denver to Oakland, Calif., in 1984, after Madden had agreed to lend his name and football prowess to a football simulation video game. Madden, the legendary coach and broadcaster, quickly made it clear who would be calling the shots. Because of the limits of computer processing power, Hawkins, who had founded the gaming company Electronic Arts two years earlier, floated the idea of a video game with seven-on-seven football, rather than the 11-on-11 version used in the N.F.L. Madden just stared at him, and said "that isn't really football," Hawkins recalled. He had to agree. "If it was going to be me and going to be pro football, it had to have 22 guys on the screen," Madden once told ESPN. "If we couldn't have that, we couldn't have a game."

The extra years spent developing a more realistic game, which was called John Madden Football and debuted in 1988 for the Apple II computer, paid off. Decades later, the Madden NFL series of video games continues to sell millions of copies annually, has helped turn E.A. into one of the world's most prominent gaming companies and has left a lasting mark on football fandom and the N.F.L. Although he coached the Oakland Raiders to a Super Bowl victory and was lauded for his work as a television analyst, Madden, who died Tuesday at age 85, is better known to legions of younger sports fans as the namesake of the iconic video game franchise that has generated more than $7 billion in revenue. "Every dorm room right now, every basement, every couch, there's people sitting down playing Madden," said Scott Cole, a longtime sports broadcaster who has called games for several years for the Madden Championship Series, the most competitive Madden NFL tournaments.
Slashdot reader schwit1 first shared the news of Madden's passing.
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How John Madden Became the 'Larger-Than-Life' Face of a Gaming Empire

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  • John Madden! Football! aeiou!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • I didn't even care about football, but damn Genesis Madden was awesome. We'd blast the intro song while getting cokes to drink while playing:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • by dcw3 ( 649211 )

      When I read your comment, I was thinking you were a true geek, and then I saw your signature and I was sure. I worked on a couple of DG Novas back in the 70s as a USAF technician.

    • Madden games didn't really get great until they got Madden commentary, though. If you want to score, you've got to complete plays! etc. Man listening to that guy was hilarious.

  • >"...every basement, every couch, there's people sitting down playing Madden," said Scott Cole...

    ...or reading /.
  • I remember playing it in the late 80s and 90s. Though if I recall correctly I found it difficult to play the first version. I felt like it required you to have a PhD in computational football modeling.

  • The NYT article is paywalled, or at least throttled. Does anybody have a real link?

    Of related interest, here's a video showing the evolution of its game graphics. [youtube.com]

    • The NYT article is paywalled, or at least throttled. Does anybody have a real link?

      Of related interest, here's a video showing the evolution of its game graphics. [youtube.com]

      No it's not. I get in just fine. Never have any issues with the NY Times articles. The problem must be on your end.

      • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        You must work for the Comcast help desk. The problem is "always" on the customer's side.

        • Considering I've worked in IT for decades, yes, in the vast majority of cases the problem is on the user's side.

          Which is clearly the case in this instance.

  • More than a video game.
  • The six-legged turkey wasn't going to invent itself.
  • EA in all their money-grubbing glory has slowly turned what once was a good game into a terrible one with pay to win mechanics that we expect from EA. Also the annual release of Madden means people have to pay full price for last years game with minor tweaks. Players have noted numerous places in the game where they forgot or could not bother to change Madden [Year] signs from the last version. Sure EA announces new "features" but many long time Madden player will tell you that feature was removed years ago
    • Maybe we are playing different games, but I've been playing Madden 18' a lot recently on a refurbed Xbox one. Having a wonderful time. The franchise mode is really awesome and I really enjoy how you can be minorly involved or super involved in how the team runs over the season.

      I don't like doing all the draft stuff, caring about the salary caps or some of that stuff. I just like playing a regular season the best I can and hopefully get into and through the playoffs.

      I imagine if I plugged my xbox one into th

      • Congrats, if you have Madden 18 then you have Madden 22 but with fewer pay to win mechanics. The only major difference is your roster is not updated.
  • NFL 2k was starting to kill EA's Madden Football, simply because NFL 2K was priced right to purchase every year compared to Madden Football. There wasn't any real value in paying extra for Madden. Then EA whipped out its check book and signed an exclusive deal with the NFL so they wouldn't have to compete with Sega and Sony.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    It still confuses me that this was not clearly seen as anti-competitive behavior and regulated in some way. I guess "video games" are only a problem t

    • by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      How is that 'anti-competitive'? They were competing with Sega and Sony, and they won. It's no more anti-competitive than an author giving a single studio the rights to make a movie out of his book.

      • Given that EA bought exclusivity AFTER they saw their sales tank against Sega, it's certainly anti-competitive. They spent money to directly remove players from the market, not by improving their product to recoup lost sales. In simple terms, that how healthy markets work. While it may not have been illegal, it certainly shows they are greedy @$$holes who don't really know how to make a better product or provide "customer focused, meaningful, value add..." (replace my quotes with what ever corporate mum

        • by bws111 ( 1216812 )

          You seem to have no idea what anticompetitive means. Neither timing nor motive has anything to do with whether or not something is anticompetitive. What matters is actions. The action here was making an exclusive deal with the NFL, something that either Sony or Sega could have done. In other words, it was a competition, one which EA won.

          As for the notion that they don't know how to make a better product, etc - that is just insane. It is a freaking video game, something absolutely nobody needs. They spen

  • as seems customary now, the title of the article, the entire premise, is completely ignored in the summary. HOW DID MADDEN BECOME THE FACE OF A GAMING EMPIRE.

    Funny things is, anyone who has known anything about football knows the answer to this, there does not need to be an article about it. But there isn't, since this article isn't about that.

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