Alongside Sonic, Madden 1990 became the Mega Drive’s must-have game, drawing a whole generation to Sega’s console and ushering in the era of the blockbuster game franchise. The creators of this killer app talk to us about how it changed sports gaming as we know it 

Words by David Jesudason

The story begins on an Amtrak train that departed from Chicago in 1984. The NFL commentator John Madden is being told of a computer game that would bear his name and be similar to Strat‐O‐Matic, a pen-and-paper stats board game created in the Sixties. Electronic Arts’ founder Trip Hawkins loved the baseball version of this dice-based niche pursuit as a kid – he still plays it today with childhood friends – and his enthusiasm for adapting it to the virtual football field wins over the prolific commentator, who has no real knowledge of computers. Trip steps off the train with EA developers Joe Ybarra and Robin Antonick, tasking the latter with creating the game that was to be John Madden Football (1988) on Apple II, PC, and Commodores 64 and 128.

Trip worked with Robin on the game and it was much delayed to the point where it became known as ‘Trip’s Folly’. However when it eventually released, the first Madden of the series was a relative success, and it featured numerous plays to choose from, taken from the Oakland Raiders training manual (playbook) that was handed to Trip on that Amtrak train ride. The game later became the subject of a legal tussle between EA and Robin Antonick, with the latter unsuccessfully claiming it was influential on later Madden incarnations. In reality, Madden 88 was a blocky affair limited by the technology of the time, but it showed that a stats-based football game was possible if the right team dedicated to its creation could be formed.

“There were sports games before Electronic Arts,” says former EA chief creative director, Richard Hilleman, who designed John Madden Football (1990). “But almost all of them were videogames that happened to be sports games. The game mechanics didn’t have much to do with sports, and if you knew something about the sport, it didn’t make you any better at the videogame – often it made you worse. Those were the things that Trip really rebelled against.”

Successfully recreating sports mechanics was something Richard had recent experience of. He had just finished the superb Indianapolis 500: The Simulation for DOS PCs which was the first successful attempt at an accurate driving game that offered the thrills of the arcade from multiple angles and replays. Richard was now tasked with making a football game for the Mega Drive that could offer the same exhilarating experience as Indy 500 but on grass instead of tarmac. It wasn’t an impossible task, as was demonstrated by a PC game created by Park Place Productions in 1989 called ABC Monday Night Football.