Sports games have been around almost since the beginning of video games altogether. 1958’s Tennis for Two was the first of many attempts to get the excitement of sport captured in the virtual world.
By the 1980s, celebrity athletes and coaches were regularly approached to attach their names to games. Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, Pat Riley’s Basketball, Arnold Palmer Golf and Joe Montana Football were but a few of the many celebrity endorsed games appearing on the landscape during the decade.
The most important new appearance in the sports genre was John Madden Football in 1988 on the Apple II.
Just prior to that release, 1987’s Earl Weaver Baseball by Electronic Arts (EA) was a relatively realistic baseball simulation released to a warm reception from critics and gamers alike. It set the stage for the growth of EA Sports, the most successful brand in sports games by far.
EA followed up with John Madden Football in 1988, a game in which realism was stressed to an extent never before seen. Madden (a Hall of Fame American football coach with the Oakland Raiders in the 70s and a prolific football analyst after that) threatened to withdraw his name several times when EA suggested anything at all that veered toward the unrealistic such as seven men on a team rather than eleven.
As a result of that strict adherence to reality rather than fantasy, that strict faith to the game of American football rather than to practical hardware issues, the game’s initial development was slow and the first product suffered technical woes for Madden’s vision.
"We were trying to model NFL football on a computer with less horsepower than your watch," said Joe Ybarra, an EA producer, to Patrick Hruby at ESPN in 2009.
The investment would, of course, pay off a thousandfold. Just a few short years down the road, the franchise became a huge hit on the Sega Genesis, laying the foundation for Electronic Art’s rise to the top of the industry and for Madden’s primacy as well.
The Madden franchise is considered the grand daddy of the entire sports simulation genre. Over the course of almost three decades, Madden has come to define the sports sim genre and can rightly be called, at the very least, an inspiration for almost all of the great sports franchises today. Becoming increasingly popular and more profitable, the franchise can claim major credit for the sped up mainstreaming of video games in the US during the 1990s.
Over twenty plus years, Madden has evolved from a simple three button game of football to a game that requires a full time work ethic to compete at the top tier.
EA won major breakthrough successes on the Sega Genesis (and, to a lesser extent, the Super Nintendo) with Madden and a line of similarly realistic franchises. Tristan Donovan called the Genesis version of the game "a defining moment in sports games."
Sales from Madden and other sports games (and other, relatively mature titles) helped Sega even the playing field in its increasingly heated competition with an arrogant Nintendo during the early 1990s. The resulting industry boom marked the end of an era of uncertainty about gaming’s future. As bottom lines became larger and larger, the industry’s numerous past booms and busts were put in the rear view mirror and have stayed there ever since. Since 2000, gaming has been bigger than Hollywood.
According to ESPN, EA’s 1990 market capitalization was about $60 million. In 1993, it was $2 billion.
"More crucially, video games were suddenly cool," wrote Patrick Hruby at ESPN, “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.”
1996 marked EA Sport’s transition to 3D thanks to the release of powerful 32-bit consoles such as the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn. The move to 3D, along with advances in gameplay, software and hardware meant that by the mid to late 90s, the game was easily recognizable as a modern Madden title.
Eventually, EA Sports games would become the top competitive sports titles of all time.