Used to be, the name “Madden” was associated with hot-tempered former head coaches, goofy TV analysts with light-pen fetishes, four-drumstick turkeys, and hyperactive pitchmen hawking everything from nuts and bolts to athlete’s foot medication.

These days, it also means long lines out the door of GameStops coast to coast, rental waiting lists at Blockbuster that are almost as long, tournaments that are in danger of replacing the office football pool and fantasy leagues as the most coveted armchair-athlete achievement out there, and one of the most quantifiable “jinxes” since the Billy Goat over Wrigleyville way.

No two ways about it, Madden is huge these days. Arguably the most mainstream of all video games, the one that even non-gamers find themselves drawn to, it’s probably done more to erase the “consoles are for kids” image than even the goriest FPS or Lara Croft’s most pneumatically-enhanced profile. (It’s also emblematic of all that is wrong in today’s profit-by-any-means-necessary gaming market, with minimal enhancements in most annual installments and that exclusivity clause saying that no one but EA may produce an NFL-licensed game, but I won’t go there in this article.)

Of course, it wasn’t always that way… in fact, when the first game to bear the Mad Man’s name appeared on store shelves, it was just another 8-bit football simulation, no better than previous attempts to squeeze the gridiron game onto a 5.25” floppy and quite a bit worse than others.

John Madden Football (various/C64 version reviewed, 1988): Before this, football video games had for the most part tried to simulate the “arcade” aspects of the sport more than the strategic “game of human chess” elements. Look at early efforts such as 10-Yard Fight or the creatively-entitled Football on the 2600. Even on computer platforms, which were considered capable of playing more advanced games than any standalone console, games like 4^th and Inches saw less play-calling and more turf-pounding.

Madden was the first game to challenge this perception and really put the player in the role of quarterback, running complex plays (based on actual team playbooks) and making snap decisions on who to throw the rock to. To the presumed relief of joysticks everywhere, you tended to spend more time looking over playbooks and making decisions than in actually running those plays.  This by itself put the game in a class by itself as more of a strategic simulation, something that was rare at the time.

Even from this earliest incarnation of the Madden franchise, it’s clear a lot of effort was put into attempting to simulate most aspects of the sport. Before the game even begins, you have to wade through at least three screenfuls of options that allow you to set the length of each quarter, the difficulty level, weather conditions (or a dome), field type (real grass or carpet), and so on. (Note that even EA had to start somewhere; there are no real teams or players present here, though stat-mongers can probably look at the stats and make an educated guess as to who’s who.) You can even import custom playbooks for each team, though as far as I’m aware no supplementary data disks were ever commercially released for the game.

This is all well and good, but the main problem is that navigating the C64 Madden’s menu system quickly becomes an exercise in frustration. Maybe this is just me being spoiled by the comparatively zippy response of a modern PC or Mac, but these menus have got to be the most unresponsive I’ve encountered since the Bad Old Days of trying to use GEOS with a joystick instead of a mouse. No matter how hard you tug in a given direction, the odds are 50:50 at best that the cursor will actually move in that direction. Ditto for button presses. As if this weren’t enough, selecting playbooks often requires several disk swaps (sadly, Madden doesn’t appear to support dual-drive systems), which adds to the frustration level modern gamers are likely to experience. I timed it – it took me no fewer than sixteen minutes from the time I first booted up the game to the time I was finally taken to the stadium to start a game. At least ten of those minutes were spent waiting for disk access.

When the game finally does begin, you are taken to a playfield that might have looked impressive in 1988, but in 2008 is decidedly blocky and unrealistic; you can hardly see where all your players are! At least the action does zoom in on the player with the ball, which helps the visibility, though the blockiness remains. Not only this, but the refresh rate is very sluggish and unresponsive (like if you remember trying to play DOOM on a 386, or currently try to run Windows with less than a gig of RAM), leading to an overall frustrating play experience.

I have to admit, Madden in its first life gets an A for effort. It is frankly astounding that they were able to squeeze in most of the aspects of “real” football onto a machine as humble as the C64 was even by 1988; there are audibles, incomplete passes, trick plays, and more features that were considered too complex for simulation on home micros at that time. Not only this, but actually having John Madden as a consultant in the days when he really was considered one of the best football minds in the business, before he became a bus-riding, Tinactin-pushing caricature of himself (and when having your name on a video game actually meant you had a say in the creative process), gave it an air of instant legitimacy in a marketplace that still considered a relatively simple arcade game like Quarterback to be the height of football video games.

Still and all, the C64 version of the game is a pretty lackluster effort, especially by modern standards. Other than for historical value there really isn’t much point in digging this one up today.

Now, chances are that many of you reading this were not aware until now that the Madden franchise actually started on the C64, Apple II, and other leading home computers of the day. EA certainly is, however, and they’ve correctly identified 2008 as the series’ 20^th anniversary. Not, say, 2010, which will mark two decades since the first Madden game that was actually successful in the marketplace came out…

John Madden Football (Sega Genesis, 1990): For many gamers who lived through the Silver Age, this is where Madden history begins. Not only was this the best football game on the Genny by far (not that there was much competition; sure, Sega had a Joe Montana-sponsored game on their own house label, but that was about it), it was also good enough to finally oust Tecmo Bowl on the NES for the crown of “Best Football Console Game” in the eyes of many.

Compared to the earlier ‘88 version, there aren’t as many options. In fact, there almost aren’t any at all! You choose the home and away teams (again, without an official NFL license all you get are the cities and generic teams that only approximated their real-life counterparts), number of players, and the length of each quarter. That’s it – no weather, no turf, nothing else fancy.

Instead, where this incarnation of Madden shines is in its visual presentation and its gameplay. Although the Genesis couldn’t do hardware scaling like the Super Famicom/SNES could, Madden’s behind-the-QB perspective actually did a good job of convincing you it wasn’t technically necessary, as the field and players scaled and rotated smoother than just about any other game using such a perspective. Music and sound are limited, but effective.

Gameplay-wise, this Madden introduced the “three-window” passing system that would soon become a staple of the series. After your QB catches the snap, press C to call up the windows, in which you’ll see your three eligible receivers in their own parts of the field. This way you can quickly see who’s being hassled the most by defensemen and who’s wide open. To pass the ball to any of the three, just press the corresponding button – A, B, or C – on the gamepad. It’s a simple mechanic, but of the type that quickly becomes invisible to the player… it Just Makes Sense.

Despite the plethora of play-calling options, the action remains brisk and fast-paced, appealing to both arcade and strategy players. Previously, only Tecmo Bowl could effectively pull this off, and Tecmo Bowl had some severe limitations; every pass was either a completion or an interception, it was impossible to miss or fumble a punt, and play-calling was more of a “rock-paper-scissors” guessing game. Madden, on the other hand, offered a much more complete simulation that “felt” more like real football. Among sports fans, Madden probably did more to convince players of the relative power of the 16-Bit Revolution than any other game out there; the best NES football game just couldn’t match Madden on the Genesis for realism. And its success begat a sequel in 1992 with updated rosters and more features, then again in ‘93… and the rest is gaming history.

And right here, I think, you have the genesis (so to speak) of why Madden is where it is today. The game built a reputation early on for being a strong game, and from that core it built up what has to be considered one of the most successful video game franchises of all time – if not the most successful. We can scoff at it today for what it’s become (a symbol of complacency and the increasingly corporate nature of the industry), but make no mistake… Madden didn’t get where it is today by a fluke of marketing. It earned its position at the top of the heap. Of course, whether it still deserves that distinction is a matter of some conjecture (particularly because no one else is currently legally allowed to do it)…

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