The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (11 page)

Hawkins didn't want to play along. But he craved a piece of the $2 billion home console market. Sega, Nintendo's rival in Japan, was preparing to launch the Genesis. Industry consensus held that Nintendo's eventual NES successor would crush the Genesis the same way the NES had swamped Sega's earlier Master System. Hawkins believed otherwise. The Genesis was the future machine: great graphics, fast processor, and two joystick ports. Perfect for sports games.

Secretly, Hawkins assembled a team to reverse-engineer the console—that is, figure out a way to make EA's games run on Sega's hardware without its technology or approval as a way to avoid licensing fees altogether. Publicly, he began negotiations with Sega, once meeting with the company's executives while the reverse-engineering project went on in a nearby room. The gambit was risky: once Sega caught wind of EA's plan, it likely would sue—in part to discourage other software companies from following EA's lead, in part because reverse-engineering without copyright infringement is technologically vexing. Hawkins's team, however, managed to pull it off.

To help write the Genesis Madden code, Lyndon hired high school friend Jim Simmons. Formerly a sound programmer, Simmons approached Hilleman with a far-fetched idea: what if Madden had a pseudo 3-D field?

The EA producer laughed. "Great. So how are you going to do that?"

Simmons turned on a television set. "Kind of like this."

The field was a breakthrough. So was replacing the clumsy Apple II passing interface—on-screen action would freeze—with a still-standard system linking each receiver to the press of a button. The game Ybarra could hardly stand became the game Hilleman couldn't put down. He took Madden home. He took it on vacation. He was hooked.

Meanwhile, Hawkins revealed his reverse-engineering project to Sega and offered a deal.
Let's team up against Nintendo. Share the glory. You can sue, but we did the tech fair and square and have great lawyers. So make us an official licensee. And give us a reduced rate.
Sega normally charged an $8 to $10 fee per game cartridge. Hawkins asked for $2 per game and a $2 million cap. Negotiations stalled.

"Only two times at EA did everyone in my management team pull me into a room and say, 'We all disagree with you,'" Hawkins said. "The first time was about not having private offices. The other time was this."

He stuck to his guns. Ten days later, on the eve of a major consumer electronics show in Chicago, Sega relented, afraid EA would sell its reverse-engineering knowledge to other software companies and torpedo the Genesis's entire business model.

"Over three years," Hawkins said, "that $2 million cap saved us $35 million."

By the late summer of 1990, Genesis Madden was almost finished. Hawkins felt it would be EA's big break: right time, right market, right platform, right game. Meanwhile, Sega was in trouble. The company, like Atari before it, had signed Joe Montana as its North American spokesman but realized it wouldn't be able to complete a planned Montana game in time for the lucrative holiday retail season.

Hawkins received a phone call from Sega's Japanese president, Hayao Nakayama. It was his turn to make an offer:
Trip, you should sacrifice Madden. Give it to us to call it Joe Montana Football. This will save Christmas. We'll both be better off.
Bing Gordon, EA's top marketer, urged his good friend Hawkins to make the deal.

"I said, 'Are you crazy?'" Hawkins recalled. "This is the freaking franchise! This is the turning point. This is everything for us. Then I realized: why don't we do both?"

 

What followed became one of the biggest secrets in video game history: EA built a Montana game for Sega that was designed to compete with Madden. Sort of.

"We made sure it was totally inferior," Hawkins said.

Working from the Madden code base, EA removed the 3-D field, slashed the pro-style playbook from 113 plays to 13, and added cartoony, big-headed player graphics.

Joe Montana Football was a hit, but John Madden Football was an industry game-changer, spawning yearly sequels and creating a lucrative revenue model that still persists. Robust sales helped Sega pull neck and neck with Nintendo, triggering a second gaming boom—this time around, retailers concluded gaming was here to stay. In 1990, EA had a market cap of about $60 million; three years later, that number swelled to $2 billion.

More crucially, video games were suddenly cool, the province of older teens and college kids, young men who loved competition and talking smack. Escaping the geek world, gaming set course for the center of the pop culture sun.

"Before Madden, jocks did not play video games," Hilleman said. "Somebody playing games was more likely to get made fun of on ESPN than get featured on there."

For Madden (the man), the new world order dawned abruptly. Six weeks after the release of the Genesis game, he arrived in New York to broadcast a Jets game. In a pregame meeting with the team, an agitated New York wide receiver confronted the former coach.

"Three?" the player asked. "Three, old man? You want to see what a three looks like? I'll take you out on the field and show you a three!"

"John had no idea what the guy was talking about," Hilleman said. "We wanted John to rate the players, even gave him a chart. But we added him late to the project. He didn't get it done. So [associate producer] Michael Brook and I sat down and rated them ourselves. Right away, we get a call from John's agent. All he says is, 'John will be doing the ratings next year.'"

En route from gaming hit to pop culture juggernaut, the Madden franchise has tackled external competition—rival titles such as the NFL 2K series and Mike Ditka Power Football—and the internal division that accompanies any big-money enterprise, with various production studios winning and losing the right to make the game.

Madden's secret weapon? A man named Sandy Sandoval. Officially, Sandoval is the director of athlete relations for EA Sports; unofficially, he's the game's answer to World Wide Wes and Winston Wolf—part fixer, part bon vivant, the guy who helped give the game its inimitable pro football cachet.

Need an in-game ratings boost, what Madden (the man) calls "more juice"? Call Sandoval, as quarterback Byron Leftwich once did. Jonesing for an advance copy of the game? Call Sandoval, as Carson Palmer, Chad Ochocinco, and dozens of other players have done. Need to drop a few pounds, albeit digital ones? Consider it done. Last year, Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid asked Sandoval to slim down his in-game avatar, a little quid pro quo for introducing Sandoval to former Madden cover athlete Brett Favre.

"I just saw Andy at the owners meetings," Sandoval said. "He comes up to me and is like, 'Sandy, thanks for hooking me up. I saw myself in the game. My wife loves it. She loves looking at me skinny!'"

Sandoval came to EA from sports equipment maker Easton, where he canvassed clubhouses and locker rooms across the country, peddling batting gloves and hockey sticks. Each sale was a hard one. Athletes value comfort and familiarity over change. New gear was guilty until proven otherwise.

The first time Sandoval walked into the 49ers locker room with an EA Sports bag, however, things were different. He no longer had to explain himself. Or his product.

"All the young guys were already playing Madden," he said.

Years earlier, a single insight led Hawkins to create Madden: let the machine do the work. To that, Sandoval added a game-selling corollary: let the jocks do the work. His first week on the job, he signed endorsement deals with Barry Sanders and Alex Rodriguez and invited Jerry Rice to visit EA's offices. He then pushed for cover athletes. Madden didn't like the idea; after all, it was his name on the product. In 2000, though, the former coach was off the cover of Madden NFL 2001, replaced by Tennessee Titans running back Eddie George.

Overnight, cover appearances became a status symbol, in pro football and beyond. When New Orleans quarterback Drew Brees landed on the cover of this year's title, he read a Top 10 list on
Letterman.

"Teams go on the Wheaties box," Cribbs said. "But individually, when you make the cover of Madden, you've arrived."

Of course, not all publicity is good publicity: a string of injuries, performance dips, and off-field trouble for cover athletes such as Michael Vick, Daunte Culpepper, and Shaun Alexander has prompted widespread belief in a Madden cover curse. Sandoval scoffs at the notion. Arizona receiver Larry Fitzgerald does not. Last year's Madden cover featured Fitzgerald and Pittsburgh safety Troy Polamalu. When the latter sprained his knee in the first game of the season, the former freaked out.

"After that game, Larry must have texted me three times before calling me," Sandoval said. "He's the only athlete who has talked to me about the curse. Just getting him on the cover was like trying to get him to walk a tightrope. I texted him the entire season: 'Great game. You made it, dude.' Then one week I was in San Francisco, sitting next to Larry's dad in the press box. Larry's leg got caught underneath him on a catch. I'm like, 'Please, don't let this happen.' Fortunately, he came back into the game. So that doesn't count."

Phil Frazier sighs. A senior producer at EA Tiburon and longtime Madden player, he would love to bring back the comic, still-revered ambulance from the game's 1991 edition—a siren-wailing, red-cross-plastered white van that tore across the field to pick up injured quarterbacks, plowing through other players like bowling pins along the way.

There's just one roadblock.

"We've used the ambulance in presentations," Frazier said. "But with the NFL having to approve [in-game content], that's not the sort of thing we could slip past the goalie."

Football remains football, with 22 players on the screen. But for the current makers of Madden at EA Tiburon, everything else has changed. The suburban Orlando-based game-making studio took over Madden development in the mid-1990s and was acquired by EA shortly thereafter. In 2004, EA paid the NFL a reported $300 million-plus for five years of exclusive rights to teams and players. The deal was later extended to 2013. Just like that, competing games went kaput. The franchise stands alone, triumphant, increasingly encumbered by its outsize success.

Programming teams of two have swelled to 30. Offices that once contained a half-dozen game testers now house more than 100. A typical blockbuster game takes two or three years to program. Madden ships every 12 months, never mind that the effort required to approximate real football keeps rising. Digitally modeling Brees's head alone takes three to four days of work. A game spawned by the idiosyncratic vision of two men has become a popular institution. And, like any popular institution—the federal government, for instance, or
American Idol
—Madden belongs to anyone who expects something of it.

Which is to say, it belongs to just about everyone: an NFL that insists on protecting its brand; corporate suits who feel obligated to meddle with EA's signature title; a mass audience that expects each iteration of the game to be revolutionary, not evolutionary.

Behind the tinted windows of EA Tiburon's five-story office building, Jason Danahy does motion capture for Madden, filming tosses and tackles, blocks and catches, all of which are performed by stuntmen wearing black bodysuits and bright, reflective balls. Generating a single big hit can require up to four takes; an average day encompasses a 100-move shot list. Stuntmen end up with bumps and bruises, sprains and torn Achilles tendons. Mo-cap actor Chris Robin once spent a week in a hospital after rupturing his spleen.

Before a hit or tackle ends up in the game, however, it requires NFL approval. Danahy walks a design tightrope: create violent collisions worthy of the game's "hit stick" control scheme. But keep those same encounters
clean.
"We send everything to the league," he says. "We have probl ems when the guys get too fired up and shove each other after the play, or jaw at each other."

Ian Cummings is the creative director for Madden. If there's something amiss in the way the game plays, it's ultimately his fault. Mike Young is in charge of art. If the style of Pittsburgh's digital helmet numbers looks wrong, he's probably to blame. Cummings played his first game of Madden on the Apple II. Young grew up in St. Louis before the Rams arrived; as a child, Madden
was
his NFL. In a large corner office adorned with a University of Tennessee flag, the two work side by side, in part to better communicate, in part to commiserate, as in the following exchange:

CUMMINGS:
Updating player gear is such a pain. Like a guy changing from a single wristband to a double. It never stops.

YOUNG:
We have people that just catalog this stuff every week. A player will start wearing team-colored gloves. A team will put a special logo on the 20-yard line for Week 8. Another team won't wear a special patch. And if we don't have that, it ruins the game for some people.

CUMMINGS:
Madden might have the hardest community to please. It's painful. It ruins weekends. I've been out to dinner with my wife, and I check my phone [for online fan feedback]. It's all, "You suck; you're terrible; give up the NFL license."

YOUNG:
The perception among some people is that the game doesn't change every year. But I'm here working 16-hour days and sleeping in the office. That perception hurts.

To function as its namesake intended, Madden has to invoke real football. To work as a video game, it has to transcend the brutality of three yards and a cloud of dust. Feel realer than real. Be fun. This always has been Madden's animating tension—a debate between what avid gamers call "sim" (say, botched virtual long snaps) and "arcade" (say, throwing 60-yard laser-guided bombs while scrambling backward)—a split NFL players might recognize as the difference between training camp tedium and Sunday afternoon's adrenalized rush.