Madden NFL | Code Like It's 198x

John Madden would put his name on a football game only if it had a full team on each side. “The only way I’ll do it is if we can get 11 on 11,” he remembered in 2021, when “most games around then were one on one, two on two, three on three and six on six.” Meeting that condition on a 64K Apple II took years. Electronic Arts showed John Madden Football at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1988, and Computer Gaming World was still calling it “the long awaited John Madden Football” a year later. It reached the shops early in 1989. Its designer, Robin Antonick, guessed that “there were 12 to 15 man-years in the product before we shipped the first Apple version in 1989.”

That slow first game became a series. A Mega Drive version in 1990 made its name on consoles, new editions followed year after year, and by 2010 ESPN counted 85 million copies sold.

Fast facts

First game: John Madden Football, Apple II, early 1989, $49.95. IBM PC in late 1989; Commodore 64 and Amiga versions followed.
Designer: Robin Antonick, who worked on the game for about five years.
Publisher: Electronic Arts, under the EA Sports label from 1993.
Console breakthrough: John Madden Football for the Genesis and Mega Drive, December 1990, developed by Park Place Productions.
Name: Madden NFL from Madden NFL ’94, released in November 1993.
Named for: John Madden, who coached the Oakland Raiders to a Super Bowl win and became a television commentator. He retired from broadcasting in 2009 and died on 28 December 2021, aged 85.

Eleven a side

Trip Hawkins, EA’s founder, wanted a football game with a famous name on it. In ESPN’s history of the series, three men met in 1984 in an Amtrak dining car travelling through the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Oakland. Madden told ESPN in 2010 that “If it’s not 11-on-11, it’s not real football. That was a deal breaker.” Eleven years later he told the same story: the work “took like three years to make and on top of that, it was all done while traveling by train”, with plays drawn on butcher paper for the programmers to build.

The programming fell to Antonick, who had played football at Principia College in Illinois. Compute!’s Gazette told his side in 1990. His business partners had no interest in a football game, so he took a week’s holiday and spent 120 hours on a prototype, and EA soon gave him a contract. About two years into development Madden signed up, and he did more than lend his name: “He made the product significantly deeper and made it more legitimate as a football simulation,” Antonick said.

The delay caused trouble of its own. In September 1988 Antic reported that Bethesda Softworks, which made the football game Gridiron!, had sued EA for $7.3 million, claiming EA had “halted release of Gridiron after incorporating major portions of the program into a proposed John Madden Football game”. ESPN later reported that the suit was settled out of court; the Bethesda entry gives both companies’ accounts.

The Apple II game

What came out was a coach’s game as much as an action game. Computer Gaming World found that it rated professional players “in more categories than any other game to date”, used plays from “Madden’s old Oakland Raider playbook”, and let the player draw new ones on a “Chalkboard” play editor. Every player was rated from nought to nine in up to 11 skills. You could call the plays and watch, or take the joystick and run the ball yourself. The magazine’s football round-up in October 1989 thought that “Apple II owners will be impressed with what their 64K machines can do.”

Madden’s own idea of the game came through in the match-ups. He wanted to know how his right guard fared against the man opposite, and the program compared every pair of players’ ratings on every play: “If a player with a rating of 5 repeatedly goes against a player with a rating of 7, that play isn’t going to work,” the Gazette explained.

British reviewers were less sure. The Games Machine tried the Commodore 64 version in March 1990, noting that “John Madden is little (if at all) known in the UK”, and gave it 59%: “A very scruffy-looking game”, with “an impressive quantity and variety of plays but its visuals are so bad and unrealistic, generating zero excitement and little involvement.”

The Mega Drive

The version that made the series came from a different team. Park Place Productions of San Diego built John Madden Football for Sega’s Genesis, known outside America as the Mega Drive, after EA had worked out how to publish for the console without Sega’s help; the Electronic Arts entry tells that story. The cartridge was out by December 1990, and the reaction was very different. Mean Machines said it “stunned all of us at MEAN MACHINES as soon as we saw it” and called it “the best Megadrive game yet”, and credited its music and sampled sound effects to the former Commodore 64 composer Rob Hubbard. When the Amiga version arrived in March 1992, Amiga Power called the Mega Drive game “the game that took the Mega Drive owning world by storm” and “the first major Sega console game to be converted to home computer format”, while pointing out that “you won’t recognise the names as genuine NFL teams”.

New editions followed each year, first for the Genesis and then the Super Nintendo. EA sold John Madden Football ’92 on the promise that its new EASN presentation gave “better coverage than a nickel defense”, and Nintendo Power reviewed Madden NFL ‘94 in November 1993 as “Electronic Arts’ third game in the John Madden series” on the Super NES, with a full season, a password system, and “12 all-time great teams, 38 Super Bowl teams dating back to 1966 and two All-Madden teams”. The name now carried the league’s letters: Sega Visions’ comparison of football cartridges that December listed its licences as “NFL, Madden”.

Tiburon and the licence

Development then moved to Tiburon, a studio near Orlando which, in ESPN’s words, “took over ‘Madden’ development in the mid-1990s”. By 1997 Tiburon was making EA’s college football game as well, and Game Informer liked the fact that a player built up over four seasons of its NCAA Football 98 could be drafted into Madden 98. Smaller teams made cut-down editions too: Tiertex squeezed Madden 97 onto a Game Boy cartridge.

In early 2005 the National Football League gave EA five years’ exclusive rights to console and handheld games with real NFL teams, stadiums and players. By 2010 ESPN counted 85 million copies and more than $3 billion in revenue, and described a popular superstition, the “Madden cover curse”, which blamed the injuries and poor seasons of cover athletes such as Michael Vick and Daunte Culpepper on their appearance on the box.

The man who wrote the first game went to court over it. In 2013 a federal jury in California awarded Robin Antonick more than $11 million, finding that EA’s games of 1990 to 1996 were “virtually identical” to his original. The judge overturned the verdict in 2014, ruling that Antonick’s expert had compared pictures of the plays rebuilt from binary data rather than the programs’ source code, and in November 2016 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision.

John Madden retired from broadcasting in 2009 and died on 28 December 2021, aged 85. The series named after him carries on, a new edition each year.

Sources

Computer Gaming World issue 45, March 1988: Winter CES report (EA “unveiled John Madden Football”; 64K Apple; 81 offensive and 81 defensive plays per game; ratings from 0 to 9).
Compute! vol. 10 no. 4 (issue 95), April 1988: CES report (John Madden Football, Apple II, $44.95, announced).
Antic vol. 7 no. 5, September 1988, “EA sued”: Bethesda Softworks’ $7.3 million suit over Gridiron!.
Computer Gaming World issue 56, February 1989: Winter CES report (“the long awaited John Madden Football will ship ‘For sure, by April 1st’”) and football survey (“soon-to-be released”).
Computer Gaming World issue 58, April 1989: sports survey (“originally released for the 64K Apple II series”; ratings, the Raiders playbook, the Chalkboard).
Computer Gaming World issue 64, October 1989, p. 26: football games round-up (“Apple II owners will be impressed”).
Compute! vol. 11 no. 12 (issue 115), December 1989: prices (Apple II and IBM PC $49.95). Compute! vol. 12 no. 1 (issue 116), January 1990: the IBM PC version (“previously released for the Apple II series”).
Compute!’s Gazette vol. 8 no. 5 (issue 83), May 1990, pp. 22–23: John Madden Football on the Commodore 64 and interview with Robin Antonick (the prototype, five years of work, Madden’s role, the match-ups, “the first Apple version in 1989”).
The Games Machine issue 28, March 1990, p. 50: John Madden Football, Commodore 64, £14.99, 59%.
Mean Machines issue 3, December 1990: John Madden’s Football review (Mega Drive; Rob Hubbard’s music).
K (Italy) issue 33, November 1991: EA Hockey review, from Park Place Productions “after the incredible John Madden’s Football”. Nintendo Magazine System (UK) issue 17, February 1994: Park Place, “those of John Madden fame”.
Amiga Power issue 11, March 1992, p. 20: John Madden Football (Amiga; author “Park Place Production Team”; £25.99; release 20 March; Madden’s Super Bowl win with the Raiders).
Nintendo Power issue 54, November 1993: Madden NFL ’94 review and ratings (November 1993, $59.95).
Sega Visions, December 1993: football cartridge comparison (Madden NFL ’94 licences “NFL, Madden”).
Game Informer issue 53, September 1997: NCAA Football 98 review (“Tiburon for EA Sports”; players drafted into Madden 98).
Sega Visions vol. 1 no. 7, December 1991: EA advertisement for John Madden Football ’92 (EASN; “better coverage than a nickel defense”).
Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 189, March 2005: the five-year exclusive NFL licence (teams, stadiums and players).
Michael Rothstein, “John Madden on Madden: The early days of his video game, how he watches the NFL now and more”, ESPN, 25 January 2021 (web, secondary): Madden’s own account (11 on 11; three years; the train; plays on butcher paper). https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/30738025/john-madden-madden-early-days-video-game-how-watches-nfl-now-more
Patrick Hruby, “The Franchise”, ESPN, 5 August 2010 (web, secondary): the 1984 meeting on the train; Madden’s “deal breaker”; the Bethesda settlement; Park Place Productions; Tiburon; 85 million copies and $3 billion; the cover curse. http://www.espn.com/espn/eticket/story?page=100805/madden
Mike Suszek, “Madden NFL designer wins $11 million lawsuit against EA”, Engadget, 23 July 2013 (web, secondary). https://www.engadget.com/2013-07-23-ea-antonick-madden-lawsuit-ruling-11-million.html
Alex Wawro, “Court overturns Madden creator’s legal victory vs. EA”, Game Developer, 24 January 2014 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/court-overturns-i-madden-i-creator-s-legal-victory-vs-ea
Antonick v. Electronic Arts, Inc., Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, 22 November 2016, summary at Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center (web, secondary). https://fairuse.stanford.edu/case/antonick-v-electronic-arts-inc
“John Madden, legendary NFL broadcaster and Super Bowl-winning coach, dies at 85”, NBC News, 28 December 2021 (web, secondary): his death and his retirement from broadcasting in 2009. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/john-madden-legendary-nfl-broadcaster-super-bowl-winning-coach-dies-85-rcna10257