Video games often boast celebrities, but John Madden was among the first to lend his name, voice and persona to the medium.
Football wasn’t the sport I gravitated toward as a kid. But John Madden certainly made the argument that it should be.
These aren’t contradictions. They’ve always struck me as the continuation of a franchise associated with an impossible-to-ignore personality, a tone passed down from someone who loved the game in all its splendor, strategy and silliness.Today, it’s common for video games to boast celebrities and lifelike re-creations of athletes.
It’s kind of a “luck” feature. But it’s also the sort of stuff that NFL broadcasters talk about and normalize and a realization that as much as we interact with a game, we’re also watching our decisions unfold. That’s an important distinction, because while Michael Jordan and Larry Bird would also lend their names to video games around the time the “Madden NFL” series was taking flight, we don’t ever see ourselves as superstar athletes.
That only worked because the game strove to make NFL playbooks understandable. Madden’s involvement in the game can be traced to a mid-’80s train ride, when then-Electronic Arts President Trip Hawkins, one of the game’s key architects, met with the football legend on a rail jaunt from Denver to Oakland.
The “Madden NFL” games provided a bridge to this world, allowing us to draw our own plays — never as good as those endorsed by the in-game Madden, of course — to see how a game of football would unfold. To understand, in other words, how those Xs and O’s transformed into people. But the games also understood that football needed its edges softened if its appeal would be forever widened.
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