The first two episodes of It’s In The Game covered roughly five years each of development time- the first two titles in episode 1, then Madden ’92 through Madden ’96 for episode 2. An appropriate amount of time is dedicated for each- obviously, building the first two Madden games from scratch was more difficult than the first five updates. The third episode goes through a full eight versions, though, and skips a lot of the details that made the first two episodes so engaging. The years 1996 to 2003 didn’t just see the video game industry transition to CDs, but DVDs too- but these issues are mostly only described in the context of massive jumps in picture quality.
The third episode is more about Madden’s competition than it is Madden Football itself, which is appropriate. As the cliffhanger for the end of the second episode noted, NFL Gameday was the only football game for the Playstation on release. It was a high quality title too, and it’s funny watching the Madden interviewees seethe about it being described as the best football game of all the time when that isn’t exactly wrong. There’s probably a story to be told in and of itself about how NFL Gameday collapsed as a franchise so quickly, but It’s In The Game has no interest in being a bad winner. Holliday Horton, the 3D Artist for NFL Gameday, explains why NFL Gameday was so good, and she’s a fairly logical choice for the task because yeah, the 3D art quality, that would definitely do it.
A less logical choice was Ric Neil for the Madden team. It’s In The Game doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that Ric Neil’s main contribution to Electronic Arts at the time he was tapped was for the notorious disaster Psychic Detective, which described here as a 3DO game even if it did also get released for other platforms- most notably the Playstation. If Ric Neil was selected because of his familiarity with porting CD games from the 3DO to other platforms, It’s In The Game doesn’t discuss this. Part of the problem with Madden ’96 was that Electronic Arts was working off the John Madden Football game for the 3DO as a baseline. Oddly enough, though, this isn’t treated as relevant as the fact that Ric Neil personally likes football. I did appreciate the factoid of Psychic Detective costing two million dollars though. I’m not sure whether anyone involved with development had ever said out on camera how expensive that particular failure was before.
The big move that got Madden Football ’97 to outperform it NFL Gameday equivalent is also not particularly glamorous. The game was rushed to an early October release to fit onto Costco parcels. Fortunately, Ric Neil’s team was on schedule enough that the only new feature they had to cut was animating the football, so this was totally doable. Part of the trouble with John Madden Football at this point is that there are increasingly few innovations to discuss. At one point Nathan Caswell pivots to discussing how John Madden Football influenced real-life football broadcasts in terms of visual design. That yellow line which TV broadcasts use to represent where the first down marker is? That’s from video games. It’s a suitably ironic development too, given that John Madden Football games aspired to look like real sports broadcasts.
This was the main selling point of John Madden Football’s other chief rival, the NFL2K series by Sega Sports, which survived the Dreamcast as a very credible threat to John Madden Football. How John Madden Football ultimately defeated NFL2K is…an ignominious story, frankly, and I’m quite curious how the generally positive tone of It’s In The Game is going to deal with it. Then there’s the matter of John Madden himself slowly losing influence, as he’s forced to admit that to the new generation of Madden players, they don’t even remember his identity as a coach. One of the lasting influences of NFL2K was that it got John Madden off the game’s cover and put football players on. The Madden Curse is discussed in an almost obligatory way, and only really in the increasingly commercial context that video game football has been transforming into.
It was always a business, of course. Yet some of the magic is wearing off. It doesn’t help that many of the more energetic interviewees disappear this episode with fairly minimal explanation.
