Madden NFL is an American football video game series developed by Electronic Arts Tiburon for EA Sports. The game is named after Pro Football Hall of Famer John Madden, a well-known former Super Bowl-winning coach and color commentator. The game has consistently been a best seller, and has even spawned TV shows where players compete. EA Sports has announced that the video game series will continue despite Madden's retirement as a broadcaster in 2009.

Evolution

The first version of the game was published in 1988 for the Apple II series of computers and titled John Madden Football. The development team originally wanted the game to have six or seven-player teams, but Madden insisted on having 11 players per team, stating "I'm not putting my name on it if it's not real."

The game has improved and dramatically grown over the years, adding many new features. Among these is voice commentary, allowing players or watchers to hear the game being called as if it were a real game on TV. This commentary was performed by John Madden and his contemporary broadcast partner. Initially, this was Pat Summerall (Madden's partner during his days at CBS and FOX during the early 1980s on through the early 2000s) until Summerall retired; the role was then filled by Al Michaels, John's current broadcast partner on NBC Sunday Night Football (and former partner from 2002 through 2005 on ABC Monday Night Football).

1990s

In the 1990s, EA producer Richard Hilleman brought in veteran sports game designer Scott Orr, who had founded the mid-1980s Commodore 64 game publisher GameStar, and had led the design of their best-selling sports games. The team of Orr and Hilleman designed and led the development of what is today still recognizable as the modern Madden Football, the highest revenue-generating video game series in North American video gaming history. Early versions of Madden were created by external development studios (including Park Place Productions and Stormfront Studios) but by the late 1990s development was brought in-house and centralized at EA Tiburon in Orlando, Florida.

Franchise Mode

In 1997, inspired by the franchise-management game Baseball Mogul, Electronic Arts added Franchise Mode to Madden, giving players the ability to play multiple seasons, make off-season draft picks, and trade players.

2000s

There are multiple modes of game play, from a quick head-to-head game to running a team for a whole season or even multiple seasons. Online play, which was a new feature for Madden NFL 2003 (in this versions there are also mini-camp challenges) was only available for users of the PlayStation 2 console, Xbox console, or a Microsoft Windows PC until early 2004. At E3 2004, Microsoft and EA Sports released a press statement announcing that games made from July 2004 on would now be Xbox Live-enabled. In August 2004, EA Sports released Madden NFL 2005 and this game and all future versions of Madden became very popular games on Xbox Live.