by Jane Leavy
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."
Outsize Success Equals Outsize Expectations
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.
Yet while the game itself grows ever more complex—in-game playbooks that once came from Cooney's collected assistant-coach scribbles are now based on actual NFL coaching film—finding a happy medium remains more art than science. Online data mining can tell Cummings that Madden gamers threw more than 7 million interceptions while playing as Favre. But stat tracking can't tell him whether those same gamers had a thrilling time doing so.
For Madden NFL '06, EA Tiburon introduced the first major change to in-game passing since Hilleman's button-to-receiver mapping on the Genesis. They called it the passing cone. When gamers dropped back to throw the ball, they had to use an analog stick to steer an on-screen cone—imagine light from a flashlight—toward the receiver they wanted to target. The cone was intended to approximate the real-life difference between great quarterbacks and lousy ones: Peyton Manning's cone was nearly as wide as the entire field, Rex Grossman's as narrow as a laser beam. The system worked: the cone made playing QB hard. Gamers hated it, and it was gone by Madden '09.
"Whenever a feature is that polarizing, it ends up being a failure in our eyes," Frazier said. "We have to develop stuff that is pretty much universally lik
ed."
Can Madden itself remain universally liked? That's the larger question keeping EA Tiburon up at night. The franchise has surfed a pair of rising cultural tides: video games and pro football. But the ocean is shifting. Madden was once a disruptive product, a killer ambulance bowling over competitors. Now it's the status quo, established and entrenched, but possibly vulnerable. To wit: Madden NFL '10 sales were lagging behind during the game's August re-lease, usually a prime selling period. For the first time, EA Sports paid for significant television advertising in November and December. The spots helped, but launching into the teeth of a recession still kept overall sales flat. Still, current sales are less of a concern than future growth.
The game's consumers are loyal and legion, good for 6 to 7 million copies sold, year after year. The same gamers are aging, however, guys in their late twenties who are starting families and running out of the free time needed to set the price of hot dogs in franchise mode. Meanwhile, younger gamers have been weaned on Halo and Call of Duty. First-person shooters—not sports simulations—are their default genre. Industry growth is being driven by simple, social gaming—the runaway sales success of the swing-your-arm, even-Grandma-can-play Nintendo Wii; the reported 80 million users of the cartoony, point-and-click Farmville on Facebook.
Scott Orr helped design the original Genesis Madden. He shepherded the franchise through the 1990s. After leaving EA in 2001, he stopped playing the game. He recently gave it a whirl.
"It was so complicated," he said. "It used to be you didn't have to be a video game expert or a football aficionado to have fun with the game. That's why it exploded and resonated. Three buttons. Everyone could pick up and play. Now, unless you practice and have time to devote to it, you'll get your butt kicked. I suspect that on Friday and Saturday nights, guys that used to play Madden are playing Texas Hold 'em."
Jeremy Strauser started at EA in 1995, working for Orr as a game tester. Today, he's the executive producer for Madden, the man in charge of the franchise. He wears a perpetual look of earnest concern. Nobody loves the game more; nobody at EA Tiburon knows Madden (the man) better. On a shelf in Strauser's office are copies of every Madden game he has worked on, neatly boxed and stacked, tangible points of pride and dread.
"There's a lot for us to live up to in terms of history, expectations, the legacy of the franchise," Strauser said. "We're in our 22nd year. I lose sleep over screwing it up."
Forgotten but Not Gone
The sun dips over a distant San Francisco skyline. Hawkins sits in the San Mateo office of his current company, Digital Chocolate, a mobile phone game maker. The place is mostly empty. Now 56, Hawkins still plays Strat-O-Matic; like Orr, he hardly plays Madden anymore. His memories are fond but tinged with regret. Hawkins left EA in the early 1990s to spearhead 3D0, an ill-fated console maker that became a doomed software house. An icy rift between the company and its founder ensued. Detached from the game, and the company, he created, he sometimes feels like the stepfather of his own children—never more so than a decade ago, when he wasn't invited to a 10th-anniversary Madden party. Mention the old coach, however, and Hawkins smiles.
"John and I have a special shared feeling from what got created there, a mutual appreciation," he said. "It wouldn't have been created as well without the both of us. He could have thrown me under the rug. But he knows what we did."
Every Christmas, a gift arrives at Hawkins's office. A three-pound box of chocolates. Regards, Virginia Madden. John's wife.
"At the anniversary party, I heard John kept asking, 'Where's Trip?'" Hawkins said with a sigh. "'Where's Trip?'"
Once a Coach, Always a Coach
"I used to say, 'Damn it, you can't go for it on fourth down all the time,'" Madden laments. "But nobody in video games wants to give up the ball."
He is sitting at the far end of a marble-top conference table inside his Pleasanton, California, production studio, a short drive from his family home. There's plenty of food, divided into what Madden terms "floaters" (mixed green salad) and "sinkers" (baked ziti, meatballs the size of cue balls). Chowing down are Madden's son, Joe, who runs the studio's soundstage, and a handful of people from EA Tiburon: Strauser, playbook guru Anthony White, and a few others. They're here to discuss the upcoming Madden NFL '11. That is, when the former coach isn't holding court on gap control and overload blitzes.
"Let me ask," Madden said. "When we get into the spread, the quarterback in shotgun, do the linemen get in three-point stances?"
"In some sets," White said. "But largely in two-point."
"They should all be in two-point stances," Madden admonished.
Madden is 74, a grandfather, and retired from broadcasting. Clad in a black tracksuit and a collared, button-down shirt, he seems smaller in person than on television—voice less booming, movements more ginger. A few years ago, EA removed Madden from in-game color commentary duties. (When Strauser broke the news, Madden replied, "I feel that something is being taken away from me.") Sipping from a can of diet cola, his enormous cigars long gone, he remains an advocate for real football, for art imitating life.
White flips open a laptop. Using "all 11" Detroit Lions coaching film, shot from the same perspective as Madden's original pseudo-3-D field, he demonstrates new in-game blocking schemes. Madden nods his approval.
"The quarterback may fake," White said. "But the guards never lie."
Another nod.
"Anyway, running the ball wasn't Detroit's problem," White continued. "It was passing."
"Once they had Daunte Culpepper in [at quarterback], teams just dared him to pass," Strauser interjected. "He used to be so accurate. What happened to that guy?"
"Wasn't he on our cover one year?" White asked.
Everyone laughs. Madden gets serious. He breaks down upcoming rules changes. He brings up concussions, helmet-to-helmet hits and gimmick quarterbacks. A digression on how the Dome Patrolera Saints used to frustrate Bill Walsh's 49ers teams with short linebacker drops becomes a lecture on the obsolescence of the fullback, which then morphs into a short aside on player character.
Who, Strauser asked, are the hardest players to coach?
"Single guys," Madden said. "Because they don't have anyone to report to."
When Madden left the Raiders, he took a job at the University of California, offering a course called "Football for Fans." Three decades later, he's still teaching. In a way, so is his game. Current Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Raheem Morris told game producers that playing Madden has influenced the way he runs his team. Before scoring a game-winning touchdown last season, Denver Broncos receiver Brandon Stokley killed clock by running parallel to the goal line, an unconventional move familiar only to anyone who has ever picked up a control pad. Years ago, Madden wanted his namesake to resemble a television broadcast; by the late 1990s, network producers were flipping the script, deploying skycams and electronic first-down markers, peddling their own brand of hyper-real entertainment. Life imitating art.
Strauser mentions 3-D televisions and the movie Avatar. A compatible version of Madden, he said, is already in the works.
Talk turns back to real football. The Super Bowl. Indianapolis versus New Orleans. In the first half, Saints coach Sean Payton went for a touchdown on fourth-and-goal, eschewing a "gimme" field goal. He opened the second half with an onside kick. Madden watched the whole thing from his California studio, incredulous and oddly transfixed. Even now, two months later, the old coach knows exactly what he was seeing.
"I was thinking, 'S—,'" Madden marveled, "'this guy is playing a video game!'"
Eight Seconds
Michael Farber
FROM SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
CONSIDER A MOMENT. Now take that moment—maybe the most significant in sports in 2010—and break it down frame by frame into 100 or so smaller moments. Hit Stop, Rewind, and Play. Now do it again. Follow the traveling puck, the dot that connects four men. Team Canada forwards Sidney Crosby and Jarome Iginla, American goalie Ryan Miller, and re
feree Bill McCreary. Seated in front of oversized plasmas or small laptops earlier this fall, clicking through a DVD, they watch adjustments, assumptions, decisions, and unadulterated dumb luck. No need for a spoiler alert. The climax never changes. Crosby scores with 12:20 left in overtime. Canada 3, USA 2. Olympic gold. These men know too well what will happen because they were there.
The golden goal in Vancouver is embroidered on the tapestry of hockey, part of a Crosby legacy that will one day veer into legend.
But what if Crosby had not scored to end the most significant game ever played on Canadian ice and an American like, say, Joe Pavelski, who had a credible chance seconds earlier, had?
The same people who still bask in the reflected glow of the goal light would be muttering about a hockey messiah who, other than a round-robin shootout winner, had experienced a middling Olympics.
Canadians would be lining their sackcloth with fur in anticipation of winter.
Hockey in the U.S. might have undergone a dramatic updraft that likely would have made Miller a breakout star, boosted interest among hockey agnostics in NHL cities such as Atlanta and Columbus, and maybe even prodded owners of the 24 American-based teams to look past their wallets and embrace participation in Sochi 2014 so Team USA could properly defend its gold medal.
"If we'd lost to the U.S.," Iginla says, his eyes dancing, "they'd've probably made another Miracle movie."
The four men met separately with Sports Illustrated and talked through the most memorable goal scored by a Canadian since 1972 and the most deflating one scored against the U.S. since, well, ever. Viewed through the prism of personal experience they deconstructed the kaleidoscopic twists of those last eight seconds, offering explanation but not excuse, hammering happenstance into narrative. As their tales eddied and flowed, it was clear they were not simply reliving how four men came to be in one quadrant of Olympic ice on the last day of February—but telling a universal story of how the regimented and the random blend to make history.
