I saw this floating around Twitter last night after news of Madden’s passing starting making the rounds:
What a WAVE of nostalgia this graphic was. The first Madden game I ever played was for PC and came on a disk that looked like this:
I remember the controls being pretty cumbersome, but I also remember that the ‘Fake Punt-Pass’ play was literally unstoppable. In my early years of watching football I was consistently baffled that teams didn’t do it more because it worked in Madden every single time.
The first ‘console’ game of Madden I ever played was “Madden 95” on Sega Genesis. This started a tradition of getting the new Madden every Christmas, which eventually led to a tradition of just getting every Madden when it came out in August. I stood in line at the EB (Electronics Boutique RIP) inside of the now demolished Memorial Mall in Sheboygan to get a copy of Madden 2003. Madden 2004 featured the only video game football player that rivaled Bo Jackson in Tecmo Super Bowl in terms of unstoppability: Michael Vick. If I recall correctly, Madden 2005 featured the hit stick, and Madden 2006 the ill-fated ‘pass cone.’ The last game of Madden I played was Madden ’11, but the franchise is still the go-to for anyone who wants to play a football video game, and truly defined a generation of kids who learned the game not only from watching John Madden on TV, but through playing these video games for literally hours on end.
Look I’m not going to say anything about John Madden that hasn’t been said already by people who are much more articulate than me. There will never be another one like him. Legend, icon, these are words invented for guys like John Madden. He made the game fun. He made the game accessible to everyone, regardless of if you knew anything about it before you started listening to him. When you heard Pat Summerall and John Madden’s voices on the opening of a broadcast on CBS/Fox, you KNEW that was THE game you needed to watch. And when that game was a Packer game, it felt extra special.
I’ll wrap this up with one of my favorite pieces of Youtube footage, the Fox intro the 1996 NFC Championship Game at Lambeau Field:
That aerial shot of Lambeau with the Fox intro music hitting is just, *CHEF’S KISS*
PS: I realize that a ton of the footage they shot for the “All Madden” special that aired on Christmas Eve was likely shot a while ago, but it is just wild to me that he passed a few days after that was on TV. Crazy.
