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John Madden Was More Important Than You Know
The NFL is one of the biggest juggernauts in American culture. Madden helped make it that way.
That John Madden, who died yesterday at the age of 85, was enormously popular was easy to see while he was alive, and has been even easier to see now that he’s gone. But what may not be quite as obvious about Madden is that he was more than a beloved, avuncular figure. He was, in his way, a visionary, someone who had his finger on the proverbial pulse of modern pop culture, someone with deep sense of what people wanted, sometimes even before they knew it. And he was able to take that understanding of what people wanted, and use it to transform sports video games and sports television in a way that no other single figure has.
Madden was an exceptional explainer, both when he was a football coach and when he was a television announcer, and one of the things that makes someone a great explainer is the ability to understand their audience, to grasp where the audience is and where you can move it to. And what Madden grasped about football fans is that they had an unslaked appetite for insider knowledge of the game. He recognized that you could talk about the nitty-gritty details of a football game, including things like offensive-line play, without people losing interest, as long as you were able to make those details intelligible to the average fan.
He brought the same approach to the video game series that truly made him a legend. The famous origin story of EA’s Madden series is that when EA first talked to him about putting his name on a football video game, the company wanted to make the game 7v7, because that would make it easier to produce a workable game, given the limits of processing power and computer memory at the time. Madden rejected that idea out of hand, saying it had to be 11v11, just like real football, or nothing. When he was told that that could take years, he said, in effect, “Then it’ll take years.” And so it did.
It was that same ethos that led him to argue for having the game include NFL playbooks that were as big and as realistic as possible, and, for years, to personally review player ratings. Even if the goal wasn’t to make a perfectly accurate simulation (a typical game of Madden is likely to…
