Format: Sega Genesis
Release: 1990
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: In-house

John Madden Football is one of the most popular sports videogames ever. For the past 14 years, Electronic Arts has released 15 different versions of the game resulting in sales of more than 25m units. Its success has made the Madden name a powerful brand, but that wasn’t always true. Back in the late-’80s, EA’s research showed that gamers were more interested in playing a game entitled Electronic Arts Football than one called John Madden Football.
   
Few knew who John Madden was. He hadn’t begun broadcasting for Fox and most gamers were far too young to remember his coaching days with the Oakland Raiders. “Despite these research results,” says Bing Gordon, EA’s executive in charge of sport action games from 1987–1988, “our development team believed in Madden.”


   
But what about Madden? Did he believe in EA? Did he want to be involved in a videogame? Trip Hawkins, the founder and former CEO of EA, approached Madden and convinced him to pay attention to EA. Madden joined, but he wasn’t a committed team member. His early relationship with EA was only that of a cover model for the box. Getting Madden to participate in additional public relations matters was difficult. “He thought EA was a bunch of losers,” claims Gordon. But that ended with the introduction of the second Madden. (When the Madden team talks about the first John Madden Football, they refer to the 1990 Sega Genesis version, which was actually the second one after the 1989 Apple II version.) Unlike its predecessor, the 1990 Sega Genesis version achieved massive success and caused Madden’s ‘Q’ rating, a measure of celebrity factor, to shoot up. More people now knew and liked Madden as a videogame designer than as a coach.
   
Joining Madden and Gordon and heading up the game’s design were Rich Hilleman and Scott Orr. Hilleman hired Orr because of his work on the Activision title, Gamestar Football. The two complemented each other. Hilleman was a simulation guy and a stickler for realism. Orr was the arcade guy committed to keeping the interface simple and intuitive.

In the mid-’80s, game designers weren't playing on an open field. Computers and game systems had anaemic levels of memory and processing power. These limitations required developers to be selective as to how much activity they wanted moving on the screen. Creating a traditional 11-on-11 football game would not be easy. As Orr explains, “It was a real technical challenge to get 22 objects and a ball moving around on the screen.” The best the engineers could do at the time was seven-on-seven. Madden looked at the early prototype and said, “What’s this seven-on-seven? This isn’t football. If my name’s going to be on something it’s got to be 11-on-11.” So the team went back to the chalkboard. And after two years of development with the help of Jim Simmons, a talented architect/engineer, the team came up with an playable game of 11-on-11 football.