John Madden: A coach synonymous with football, thanks to a video game

John Madden, the Super Bowl champion football coach and Hall of Fame broadcaster, and namesake of EA Sports’ cornerstone video game franchise for more than 30 years, died on Tuesday. His age was 85.

Madden, whose .759 winning percentage is the highest among coaches in professional football’s modern era, is widely remembered as the leader of one of the NFL’s most romanticized franchises — the Oakland Raiders of the 1970s — and as the voice of Sunday afternoons in CBS and Fox Sports’ booths. Stints’s role as a boisterous television pitchman for hardware and beer as well as antifungal powder helped to reinforce his reputation as a friendly, open-hearted character.

Madden’s 34-year association with Electronic Arts saw him achieve a fame beyond any of these accolades. His name has become synonymous with American football. EA Sports’ Madden NFL series, begun in 1988, introduced football strategy, fundamentals, and techniques to millions of children and young adults — in both the United States and overseas.

In Madden’s video game, going back to IBM PCs and the Sega Genesis, concepts like trap blocking and zone blitzing; passing routes like the post and the drag; and defenses like the nickel and the 46, shed the telestrator jargon appended to them over the preceding two decades, and came to life in the basements and dormitories of America. Since at most 1990 when Electronic Arts published their first game, John Madden Football for consoles, “Let’s play some Madden” has been rec-room vernacular for “let’s play football.”

“Today, we lost a hero,” EA Sports said in a statement Tuesday evening. “John Madden was synonymous with the sport of football for more than 50 years. His knowledge of the game was second only to his love for it, and his appreciation for everyone that ever stepped on the gridiron.”

John Earl Madden was a Minnesota native, born April 10, 1936. He moved to California in Daly City (San Francisco Bay Area) as a young child. Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo drafted him in two teams, 1957 and 1958. He also earned all-conference honours as an offensive tackle during his senior year. He was drafted 244th by the Philadelphia Eagles, but a knee injury ended his career.

With an iconic team, a prolific win

Madden’s methods of analyzing film football were influenced by his experience in Eagles training camp. He sat with Norm Van Brocklin, the Hall of Fame quarterback who studied opposing defenses. In the 1960s, he took several assistant coaching jobs at colleges in California before joining Al Davis’ Oakland Raiders, then of the upstart American Football League, as a linebackers coach in 1967. In 1969, the Raiders reached Super Bowl II and lost to Green Bay. Madden was founded by Davis, who became the youngest head coach in football’s history.

In Madden’s 10 seasons at the helm, the Raiders became one of the National Football League’s most telegenic teams, in football’s most telegenic time, captured on the 16 millimeter reels of NFL Films and presented with glissando narration by John Facenda. Madden led the Raiders to a 103-32.7-7 record. In 1977 they won Super Bowl XI. The Raiders also participated in numerous postseason and regular season games. From the Ghost to The Post. The Immaculate Reception. The Sea of Hands is the best.

These players have a reputation for being swaggering that no other franchises can match, let alone sustain, in the 50-year history of their teams. Ted Hendricks: They’re immortals from the very first mention. Cliff Branch. Lester Hayes. Willie Brown. Jack Tatum. Fred Biletnikoff. Jim Otto. Ken “The Snake” Stabler. Dave Casper is the Ghost. Gene Upshaw, the Mummy. Known for an electrifying, deep passing offense and a relentless assault on the opposing quarterback, even the Raiders’ special teams were larger than life, led by Ray Guy, the only punter elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Madden instilled tremendous loyalty among his players. Phil Villapiano’s interception in 1974 closed The Sea of Hands at 28 to 26 for Raiders. He raced up to his sideline and presented Madden the ball. “He actually said, ‘That should be your ball, you made that interception,’” said Villapiano, selected 45th in 1971 by way of Bowling Green University. “I said, ‘Nope, coach, nobody wanted that more than you, and that’s your ball.’”

Ross Lewis/Getty Images.

In a tie and short-sleeved shirt, sneaking a cigarette on the sidelines, Madden was so recognizably the face of the villainous Raiders that, when AFL sibling Denver finally overcame their blood enemies in the 1978 AFC championship, linebacker Tom Jackson (himself a broadcaster for ESPN later) pointed at Madden and memorably declared “It’s over, fat man!” as the Mile High Stadium crowd thundered its approval. Madden retired in the year following.

The voice of Sunday afternoons, the Pitchman teacher

Madden was hired by CBS Sports to be an analyst on Sunday NFL games after he had finished his coaching career. In two years, he was promoted to the network’s top announcing job, alongside Pat Summerall, their voices marking the end of a weekend, and the beginning of homework for a generation of schoolchildren. This partnership would last 21 years, two networks and include the virtual broadcast booth that Madden NFL used for its first eleven years.

Madden’s unique persona, an everyman with a rambunctious voice and a deeply knowledgeable football mind, led Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins to approach him in 1984 about a football computer simulation his two-year-old studio was developing. Hawkins made his case during a three-day trip by train from Denver to San Francisco. Madden was an aphobic and hated flying so he used his RV as a means of getting to work.

Madden insisted that the video game present two teams of 11 players — 22 sprites on a single screen, a brutal workload for personal computers of the day. Hawkins, along with the EA developers were more at ease delivering a seven-on-7 match.

“That’s not real football,” Madden said. Hawkins claimed that it would take several years to make a football game that could be played by all 22 of them. “Then it will take years,” Madden said.

“It was important to me that if it was going to be football, it was going to be real football, it was going to be NFL football,” Madden told ESPN video games journalist Jon Robinson in 2011. “And to Trip, while this was a computer game, to me, this was a teaching tool. It was my dream that computers would allow coaches to use their computer to display plays to his players and let them analyze whether they were successful.

“If that worked,” he added, “I thought might be a good high school tool or even a good college tool.”

Photo taken at the Strong National Museum of Play, and World Video Game Hall of Fame

John Madden Football Launched June 1, 1988 on the Apple II and 1989 on the Commodore 64, 128 and MSDOS computers. While it received positive reviews at the time it wasn’t a major success because video gamers didn’t have any experience with American football technicalities, they were unable to play it at organized levels. Madden earned $100,000, and 5% on sales.

John Madden Football ’92, the series’ second appearance on Sega Genesis, was a landmark work that sold 400,000 copies — five times the internal projection of 75,000 units. EA famously reverse engineered Genesis to allow it to be published without having to pay a Sega-exclusive $10 per-unit licensing fee. Over the next five years, the series acquired full licensing from both the NFL and the NFL Players Association, sold more than 8 million copies, and became the keystone of EA Sports’ “It’s in the game” promise.

“I was with my 8-year-old grandson the other night while he was playing, and it’s amazing how much they know now at such a young age,” Madden told ESPN in 2011. “You don’t have to wait until high school to get to know the plays and the rules now. Kids can call out rules quicker than someone inside the game can, and it’s just amazing to me the knowledge of young players. And then for the high school kids, this is how they’re learning how to play.”

Madden NFL’s reach and popularity surged even more at the advent of CD-based console gaming and motion-captured animations. An appearance on the cover of the current game became an annual honor — or curse — for NFL players beginning with Tennessee’s Eddie George in 2000.

The influence of Madden’s video game further manifest in real-life NFL games as its earliest fans became players and head coaches themselves. Raheem Morris, promoted to head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2009, told reporters he “majored in Madden,” at Hofstra in the late 1990s, a fact that delighted Madden himself. The same season, Denver’s Brandon Stokely caught a game-winning touchdown pass and ran parallel to the goal line to drain the clock, a tactic conceived on basement couches more than a decade earlier.

Multimillions sold and billions made

Madden NFL, despite the negative reviews, has been an enormous sales success for Electronic Arts. It is an extremely popular video game that has had a unique NFL license since 2005. EA Sports boasted 180 million units sold in the Madden franchise’s 30th anniversary year, and claimed record-setting first week sales for the game in 2020. That does not include the explosive growth of the game’s Ultimate Team mode over the past 10 years, contributing to billion-dollar totals on EA’s bottom line each year.

John Madden’s original contract with EA paid him $100,000 in 1984, and 5% of the game’s sales. Rumours circulated that Electronic Arts could drop Madden from their game in 2005 after he retired from broadcasting, having called the NFL on all four networks. EA plummeted Madden with $150 million to retain his name in perpetuity for their video games. CNN Money revealed that Madden was receiving $2 million annually for the right to his name.

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He was, by all accounts, an active participant in the game’s development even in his retirement from public life. Developers from EA Tiburon, the Maitland, Florida studio behind the game since 1995, have often spoke of annual visits to Madden’s home in Pleasanton, California, usually in the winter, to show him the game. Madden was known for passing blunt judgment — consistent with his original dismissal of Hawkins in 1984 — if something was not up to standard.

“I don’t think about having a great time playing the game,” Madden told Kotaku in 2011. “You know, they say if it’s in the game, it’s in the game, well, what I do is watch the game. “I try to see every game. [NFL] game and just watch the trends, see what they’re doing now, and whether that is in the video game, so we’re playing the same game that they’re playing in the NFL.”

Madden, when asked about how he would play video with his Raiders team if it were not for his coaches, unabashedly invoked Ted Hendricks, his favourite player.

“Now that I really see how much havoc [Hendricks]I believe he would have made a great addition to the team if I could move him about out there. game,” Madden said.

“I’d just blitz them, every play,” he said.