The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty
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Re: The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty
#2I'd really like to see a Gruden NFL game myself
Re: The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty
#3They bought the exclusive contract to the NFL when they faced a challenge from 2K games. That's how this dynasty stays around.
Re: The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty
#4FTA: "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."
They became a monopoly.
Re: The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty
#5There's this odd little rumor/story that gets passed around from time to time that Madden, deep down in the core of its object code, is still running the SNES game engine from the 1990s.
From a blog somewhere else:
"Madden 2015 has a long, dark history. Inside its inmost code, there's a tiny copy of snes9x, linked to a tiny virtual display, used only in memory, never shown to the user. This arrangement has been used to drive every version of Madden since John Madden Football 97, although the emulator then was a custom job written (poorly) by EA."
Re: The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty
#6There's this odd little rumor/story that gets passed around from time to time that Madden, deep down in the core of its object code, is still running the SNES game engine from the 1990s. From a blog somewhere else: "Madden 2015 has a long, dark history. Inside its inmost code, there's a tiny copy of snes9x, linked to a tiny virtual display, used only in memory, never shown to the user. This arrangement has been used…
Some further digging actually sent me back here (via a "Breaking Madden" article linked from a Metafilter discussion)[0].
Re: The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty
#7I'd really like to see a Gruden NFL game myself
...with an automatic win for the team that runs "Spider 2 Y Banana" first.
Re: The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty
#8They bought the exclusive contract to the NFL when they faced a challenge from 2K games. That's how this dynasty stays around.
Yeah, really not much of a story here: EA has an exclusive license for an incredibly popular American sport. Sports and video games are right in the young-male, demographic wheelhouse
Re: The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty
#9They bought the exclusive contract to the NFL when they faced a challenge from 2K games. That's how this dynasty stays around.
There was an edition back in the day that didn't have the NFL rights:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madden_Football_64
I wonder what the story was there.
Re: The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty
#10There's this odd little rumor/story that gets passed around from time to time that Madden, deep down in the core of its object code, is still running the SNES game engine from the 1990s. From a blog somewhere else: "Madden 2015 has a long, dark history. Inside its inmost code, there's a tiny copy of snes9x, linked to a tiny virtual display, used only in memory, never shown to the user. This arrangement has been used…
I worked on Madden for several years. It would be delightful and hilarious if that were true.
There is some very old code in there, or at least was when I was on it. I recall digging up the code that updated your score on a touchdown—not a bit of logic that has much need to change—and saw Steve Chiang's initials on it, from back when he still coded.
One obvious sign is that it's a fake is that there's no way there would be a shitty emulator in Madden. Icer Addis, the creator of Nesticle, worked on Madden for years and wouldn't have tolerated that. If there was an emulator, it would be a good one.