Apologies to whatever lousy football game came before December 1987, but that’s where this history lesson starts. That’s when the Tecmo Bowl arcade game came out.
Tecmo Bowl arrived on Nintendo in February 1988, and it was a huge hit. It made effective use of NES technology, had a lot of charm, and introduced the basics of football gameplay. Tecmo Bowl was never quite as fun to me as it was to other people, but it sure hinted at what a great video game the sport of football could be.
Why does football translate so well to video gaming? I think it’s because football is affected by a healthy 50/50 mix of a pre-scripted play diagram and the execution following the snap. Half tactics, half skill. Developers didn’t need to program players to improvise much. And the basic controls — running, tackling, and passing — were easily mapped to a video game controller.
In the first Tecmo Bowl, the offense and defense had four plays each, offering 16 unique combinations of pre-drawn assignments. In the beloved 1991 followup, Tecmo Super Bowl, teams had eight plays each, making 64 unique combinations. Compare that to a retro basketball or hockey game, where you can see the same patterns over and over. Now consider that the down, distance, and game situation also affect what both teams do, and of course the human gamer pushing the buttons makes the possibilities limitless.
Even though its loved for its simplicity, Tecmo Bowl proved to be a fairly complicated game, with just two buttons, low-fi physics, and simplified rules. Can you only imagine what would happen if football games became more realistic?
Oh, about that … Former coach John Madden signed with Electronic Arts, hoping to make a football simulation as an “educational tool.” Try telling that to the parents who watched children’s brains rot while playing video games over the years.
The first John Madden Football was released in June 1988 for the Apple II computer, and well, it’s more of an antique than a video game, with slow-as-molasses, heavily digitized movement. Just look at this screenshot:
The game later appeared on Commodore 64 and Commodore 128, and if those names are unfamiliar to you, there’s a good reason why. To really bring Madden’s vision to life, it was going to need more powerful technology. Good thing the Sega Genesis existed. And so we got a real John Madden Football game in 1990.
It’s pretty remarkable how playable John Madden Football still is today. The action moved in the now-familiar EA style, ruled by something resembling real-life physics. Players had weight and momentum. They didn’t just run in straight lines and make jagged turns; there was more curving, which you didn’t see in any other games.
Madden was the first to use the passing mechanic that stuck around forever, where each receiver is assigned to a button. On the downside, the game was plagued with passing windows, little boxes at the top of the screen showing your three receivers but blocking the actual field. The fact that passing windows stuck around for three more years is a head scratcher.
The pace from play to play was slow as hell, another flaw that stuck around too long. And the control, while groundbreaking, was never the best. It felt more like slow skating than football-like running, so it’s no wonder that EA’s early hockey games were so damn good.
The next year, Super Nintendo got its first Madden, but the Genesis versions always played better. Anyway, for John Madden Football ’92, EA added more plays and upped the difficulty. The next year, not much change, a marginally quicker pace.
It wasn’t until Madden NFL ‘94 that we got a much faster pace and a new physics engine, along with NFL licensing. It still wasn’t great, but had a goofy charm.
Let’s pause Madden for a bit.
Back in 1990, in one of the weirder plots of the football gaming story, Sega was looking to make a splash with Joe Montana Football, but their developer botched their end of the deal and Sega had no game to sell. In a mad scramble, they turned to EA for help. EA then took their yet-to-be-released Madden engine and purposefully made it worse before selling it to Sega. Have you ever wondered, “Did they make this game bad on purpose?!” In this case, yes, they did. (Credit to the Sega-16 website for the full Joe Montana Football background.)
Anyway, the game had Madden’s same vertical view and an even sharper look, but much worse gameplay. The running and tackling was okay, but passing was lifeless and frustrating. You had a single passing window and you shuffled through receivers, which was only made tolerable by the fact that defensive AI was nonexistent.
Sega switched the viewpoint for a couple years, then switched back, improved the graphics, changed the name of couple times, added a play-by-play announcer, and made some ambitious gameplay changes, but never addressed the problem of an awkward passing game, all the way to their last Genesis edition, NFL 98.
Tecmo brought its lovable game over to 16 bits in 1993. Tecmo Super Bowl on SNES got an overhaul in graphics, and for whatever reason, the Genesis version didn’t. They were both fun games, not changing much from the NES versions. The SNES version is beloved, for what it’s worth. I actually prefer the next two in the series, Tecmo Super Bowl II: Special Edition and Tecmo Super Bowl III: Final Edition, which got another visual overhaul and slowed down the action a bit.
There are a bunch of other 16-bit games, and they mostly stunk. They were either inferior Madden clones or trying something wildly different and failing badly. NFL Quarterback Club from Acclaim is worth a mention, in that it was at least popular, an easy-to-play Madden clone.
Speaking of Madden again…
After four seasons, EA finally wised up and ditched the passing windows, and Madden NFL 95 was the glorious result. Okay, it wasn’t that glorious, but it was good. It got another new engine with better movement, a bit faster speed, and a smooth passing game. It felt just right as a Genesis sports game, not too simple, not too complex.
In a curious move, Madden NFL 96 got yet another new engine, which was too fast and wild with a sloppy passing game. EA wised up one more time and went back to a solid engine for Madden NFL 97 and Madden NFL 98, which were both good games.
I didn’t even mention college games. EA had four of them, Sega had two, and Mindscape had one on SNES. The most popular was EA’s Bill Walsh College Football 95, which used the Madden 94 engine without passing windows, a really cute game. And the last in the Genesis run, College Football USA 97, wasn’t bad either.
And oh yeah, there was Mutant League Football, which was Madden 93 from hell, with over-the-top horror movie goofiness. It’s one of the rare expensive sports game these days, going for around $50, and believe me, it’s not worth it.
The 32-bit consoles showed up in 1995, and Sony made the first splash with NFL GameDay, exclusive to PlayStation. It made elegant use of 2D sprites in a 3D world. The gameplay was primitive but seemed promising, and we started to get a glimpse of the new possibilities of having a controller with four face buttons and four shoulder buttons.
Madden stumbled and didn’t get a 96 version ready in time, so their first version was Madden NFL 97, and man, it was ugly. Whereas GameDay was overly tight and robotic, Madden was out of control. It felt like you were controlling unskilled kids on steroids, running aimlessly and missing every pass by a mile.
Tecmo took a stab at 32-bit football with another game titled Tecmo Super Bowl, with gameplay similar to before but lacking the 16-bit charm. It fell flat and Tecmo went away for a long, long time.
Sony had a good thing going, with both GameDay and NCAA GameBreaker, but it didn’t take them long to screw it up. The shift to 3D “polygon” graphics was ugly, and the more advanced they tried to make their games, the less fun they became.
Other publishers weren’t posing a threat. Sega’s short run of NFL on Saturn was terrible. Acclaim? Forget it. The Quarterback Club games were atrocious. An odd one-off release on Saturn, Quarterback Attack With Mike Ditka, centered its action around bits of full-motion video. It was the kind of thing that when you first saw it, you might have thought, “Wow, this is the future of video games,” but nothing could be further from the truth.
And down from the heavens came Midway — those heathens who struck gold with NBA Jam four years prior — bearing the gift of NFL Blitz. In arcades in 1997, and on PS1 and N64 in 1998, Blitz was a huge hit.
The 7-on-7 action took all the aggravation out of football gaming. You weren’t going to misfire a pass or whiff on a tackle. The playcall process was extremely fast. There were no penalties and a stopped clock, so you could ignore clock management. And of course, as everyone seemed to love, there were late hits after every single play. If football games couldn’t be realistic, they may as well be fun.
Midway’s biggest challenge was making Blitz feel new each year. The series kept on chugging through Dreamcast, Xbox, and PS2, and the upgrades were mostly cosmetic. It wasn’t long before it felt old.
EA started to make headway with Madden NFL 99, switching to 3D polygons and drastically cleaning up some aspects of the game. Although it was critically acclaimed at the time, it’s pretty hard to go back to these days. Madden NFL 2000 was a bigger improvement, possibly the first serviceable simulation ever, with much better AI and control. It debuted hot routes, allowing you to change a single receiver’s assignment. EA was on the right path, just in time for the next generation.
The jump to 128-bit graphics was big for football. Sega Dreamcast showed up the same year and launched with Sega’s own NFL 2K. It looked stunning then, and it still looks good today. People were blown away. It was also the first football game you could play online. The game itself, well, it’s overrated as hell. It had weak AI and painfully slow passes. Players moved like robots. It honestly had more in common with Blitz than with Madden, despite everyone thinking it was the most advanced sim they’d ever seen.
Madden NFL 2001 on PlayStation 2, on the other hand, was a complete breakthrough. EA went all out for authenticity: realistic graphics and a huge set of well-engineered plays. All 22 players on the field were pretty well guided by logical AI. For the first time in a football sim, it was pretty easy to comprehend everything happening on the field. It set the groundwork for an amazing run of 11 more Madden games in the generation.
Xbox got its Madden the next year, and each year the game had slight improvements. Madden 2004 stood out with a smoothed-out look and deep strategy settings that had really come together over the past few years. EA was also releasing well-received college games, usually with a retweaked Madden engine.
Sega/2K didn’t have the same strong foundation, but they managed to make better games each year too. Sega had always gone out of its way to be unlike Madden, but by 2003, they were copying Madden’s tried-and-true visual interface and focus on realism. ESPN NFL Football (2K4) is a solid title, combining 2K’s unique physics and graphics engines with a more spread-out, realistic game, using playcalling nuances that were inspired by Madden.
In 2004, the herd suddenly thinned. Sony/989 Sports gave up on GameDay, despite finally releasing something decent with NFL GameDay 2004. The Xbox-exclusive NFL Fever franchise lasted just three years, ending with NFL Fever 2004, which was also decent. After two basic Blitz games in the generation, Midway took a wrong turn to an arcade/sim hybrid in NFL Blitz Pro, and they took a seat on the bench.
Going into the 2004 NFL season, it was down to two: EA vs. 2K, the Super Bowl of video games. And it delivered. It was the magical season where both games were A+ level great.
Madden NFL 2005 was the fine product of solid yearly improvements, crisp, easy to control, and tactically rich.
ESPN NFL 2K was a shockingly drastic step up from its predecessor, more balanced, with more natural motions and a more precise passing game. It had certain elements that people still praise, like lifelike tackling animations and organic interaction between linemen. Compared to Madden, it was loose and unpredictable.
Both games suffered a few of the same flaws that are hard to avoid. Certain plays were too reliable, others were useless. The CPU opponent botched late-game strategy.
It’s easy to find guys on the internet claiming that ESPN NFL 2K5 was the best football game ever. But for me, if forced to choose between the two, I’ll take Madden 2005. It was so consistent, well-tuned, and fair. It placed the chess match of football comfortably into your hands.
It was hard to pick just one … unless you were on a budget. 2K made a ballsy marketing move, charging just $20 instead of the standard $50. If they couldn’t outsell EA on merit alone, they were going to entice gamers with one hell of a bargain.
The fat cats at EA weren’t going for that. In December 2004, they went to court and bought the exclusive NFL license. A quote in the New York Times article about it says, “Executives from the N.F.L. and its players’ licensing subsidiary said the decision to grant an exclusive license to Electronic Arts was based on a theory that the N.F.L. brand name would be better served by associating with a single game maker.” Translation: The NFL wasn’t turning down the $300 million EA was paying them.
And poof! It was game over. After that, EA’s only NFL competition was themselves.
They released Madden NFL 06 on PS2, Xbox, GameCube and the brand new Xbox 360, and took a weird leap of faith with the QB Vision feature, better known as the “passing cone.” Hard-nosed gamers had to actually control the quarterback’s line of sight! Luckily, the rest of us could turn the stupid thing off. The Xbox 360 version of Madden 06 was particularly hammered by critics because it was clearly rushed.
The college counterpart NCAA Football 06 was rock solid, just the right tweaking of Madden and no passing cone, an A+ game.
EA started an all new franchise in 2006, NFL Street. The trio of Street games were popular, but I’m not really a fan. They took too much out of football without putting anything valuable in.
Poor Midway showed up again, getting creative with Blitz: The League. Unfortunately, its gameplay innovations changed things for the worse, and it was loaded with distasteful gags that purposefully painted pro football in a bad light.
Madden stayed on the generation a whopping six more years. On PS3 and Xbox 360, it was time for another overhaul with Madden NFL 07. The new game was blasted when it came out. It was sloppy and added dumb gimmicks.
Over the next 10 years, reviewers complained mercilessly that Madden was a shameless roster update and that EA had gotten lazy without competition to motivate them. As I’ve learned from reviewing games, though, the simple narrative isn’t always accurate. Madden actually got better little by little. 08 was better than 07, 09 was better than 08, and 10 was better than 09.
It’s worth noting that EA tried some laughable gimmicks too. One year, you could press “rewind” if you didn’t like the outcome of a play. Another year, there was a button-mashing mini game to scoop up the ball after a fumble, which felt way out of place.
All-Pro Football 2K8 was the last gasp for 2K. Without an NFL license, 2K bought rights to over 250 retired players, and you had to create your own team before even stepping on the field. I gave it an A+, but I admit I’m generous to it. The gameplay used an updated 2K5 engine, and it was flawed. Some of its strange motions were tough to get used to. A refined sequel could have been great, but a sequel never came.
Midway tried one more time with Blitz: The League II, again falling flat with tired gameplay and distasteful gags, and the company folded soon after.
Tecmo made a one-off return with the downloadable Tecmo Bowl Throwback, packaging their old gameplay into a modern-looking game with made-up teams.
Backbreaker deserves a mention simply for how damn unusual it was. Made by 505 Games (yeah, I never heard of them either), it put the camera directly behind your player, capturing the chaos of football at the cost of intuitive control. If you like football games enough to be reading this far, you should try it out.
Meanwhile, EA took over the arcade subgenre. In 2009, they released the download-only Madden NFL Arcade, a five-on-five game with outlandish power-ups and delightfully stripped-down rules: no kicks, no punts, not even first downs. It was a lot of fun, I thought, but other reviewers didn’t like it.
And in 2012, after EA bought the Blitz name, they made NFL Blitz 2012. It was just like old Blitz with nice graphics and no late hits, my favorite Blitz game.
Madden jumped to PS4 and Xbox One in 2013. That year, a lawsuit by college athletes put an end to NCAA video games, so NCAA Football 14 on PS3 and Xbox 360 was the last college sports game ever.
For now, Madden dominates the market year after year. People still complain that EA doesn’t do enough to freshen up the engine, but of course, people still buy the games.
In Madden NFL 18, there was a story mode called “Longshot,” where you brought a single player from his high school days up to the NFL, intertwining gameplay with an off-the-field life story. An interesting idea, but that’s not exactly what I play sports video games for.
Reviews of the recent Maddens seem to always say the same things: the graphics are marginally better than last year, the gameplay is the same, and it’s a damn shame that Madden has no competition. Inevitably, someone will say that EA still hasn’t topped the great ESPN NFL 2K5.
EA won the battle, and their reward is a big bag of cash every year. They screwed 2K hard in the process, of course, but that’s business I guess. If that bothers you, don’t just blame EA. Blame the NFL, who also profited from the deal.
I don’t get too bent out of shape about it for two reasons. First, it’s dumb to get upset about anything video game-related. We get what we get. These are toys. And second, if you really had to say which publisher “deserves” to win in football, it’s EA Sports. ESPN NFL 2K5 may have been the best game that season, but it’s the only year you could say that about 2K. If you judge the quality of football games over the long haul, EA wins by a landslide. If you judge based on innovations, it’s an even wider disparity.
The first Madden on Genesis was groundbreaking, not just for football games, but for all sports games. The first Madden on PS2 was groundbreaking in a different way, combining years of game-making experience with powerful new technology. These days, almost every sport is dominated by a single publisher. For football, you could do a lot worse than EA.
Published March 10, 2020
Updated October 5, 2023