The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (10 page)

You can measure the impact of Madden through its sales: as many as 2 million copies in a single week, 85 million copies since the game's inception, and more than $3 billion in total revenue. You can chart the game's ascent, shoulder to shoulder, alongside the $20-billion-a-year video game industry, which is either co-opting Hollywood (see
Tomb Raider
and
Prince of Persia
) or topping it (opening-week gross of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: $550 million;
The Dark Knight:
$204 million).

You can witness the cultural power of Madden: grown men lining up outside Wal-Marts for the game's annual midnight release; rock bands, such as Good Charlotte, going mainstream via inclusion on the Madden soundtrack; a pokerlike underground circuit of cash tournaments; the black-cat mojo of the Madden cover curse superseding the
Sports Illustrated
cover jinx; Madden himself being recognized less for his Hall of Fame coaching and broadcasting career than for a game that beat him into Canton.

Alternately, you can listen to Cleveland Browns kick returner Josh Cribbs.

"I used to play Madden all the time with [former teammate] Kellen Winslow [Jr.]," he said. "When Kellen got married, he did it at his house. After the ceremony, he went to play Madden! He just got married. His wife is sitting there. And he's playing. We all made fun of him."

It's a Madden, Madden, Madden world. We're all just playing in it. How did this happen? That's the story you don't know ... And it's a story that could have starred Joe Montana.

They wanted Montana. Wouldn't anybody? Think about it: you're Hawkins; a pigskin game is your lifelong dream. As a child, he played wingback on a flag-football squad. He also fell in love with the 1967 edition of Strat-O-Matic Football, a paper-and-dice pigskin game that was, in a rudimentary way, the Madden of its era.

A bright and precocious teenager, Hawkins created a Strat-O-Matic knockoff and attempted to start a business. His next-door neighbor in La Jolla, California, was former AFL president Milt Woodard, which gave Hawkins the opportunity to send a proposal to Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt. Hunt wrote back.
Beat it, kid.

No matter. Hawkins ordered parts. Set up an assembly line in his family's living room. Borrowed $5,000 from his father and took out ads in NFL game programs.

He lost every penny.

The flop was a slap in the face. How could a great football simulation not sell? Around the same time, he got his first computer and, with it, an answer. Strat-O-Matic was too hard. Players had to crunch too many numbers, obliterating the necessary suspension of disbelief. Solution? Put the math inside the computer. Let the machine do the work.

While attending Harvard, Hawkins created his own major in game design. He programmed his first football simulation on a PDP-11 computer, a metal cabinet with flashing lights and tape-reel data storage that spanned two rooms. In 1975, he determined it would take exactly seven years for enough computers to reach homes to support a gaming business.

Eight years later, he was right on schedule. Hawkins was Employee No. 68 at Apple Computer. They called him "junior Steve Jobs." He codified the company's unique, oft-imitated start-up culture. Made millions in stock options, then cashed out. Started Electronic Arts out of his own pocket from a home office, then moved to his first real workspace in San Mateo, California, just north of Silicon Valley. In January 1984,
Time
magazine named the personal computer its "Machine of the Year"; about 20 miles south in Cupertino, Apple was putting the finishing touches on a beige plastic box called Macintosh.

Meanwhile, Hawkins had just shipped his first games, packaged in stylish boxes that looked like album jackets because that's what EA was all about: the artists and the creators. The anonymous guys coding Atari 2600 cartridges were finally getting their rock-star due. Before founding EA, Hawkins went to Los Angeles to study at the feet of record mogul Jerry Moss. What's wrong with a little Hollywood?

Take EA's early basketball game: One-on-One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird. The real guys—sports celebrities—on the box. On the screen too. Controlled by a joystick. No one had ever done that before. Julius Erving even came to Hawkins's studio and hung out for a day. Shot hoops with Hawkins at a local YMCA. So awesome. Only he was not Hawkins's hero. Not like Montana. Montana was God. Not
a
god.
The
God. Montana played football, as Hawkins briefly did at Harvard, but better. Way better, which is kind of the point. He had already won a Super Bowl for the San Francisco 49ers. Montana-to-Clark. The Catch.

Hawkins was about to make a football game to make up for his failed high school project and show the world everything he had learned. When his dream was ready, when it was coded and debugged and sitting on a store shelf in a stylish box that resembled the cover of, say, Def Leppard's
Pyromania,
it was going to need a face. A mug to move the product, for sure, but also to represent the creators.

Montana. Gotta be Joe Cool. Seriously, who else would even be worth considering?

The playbook belonged to the Oakland Raiders, 1980 vintage. There were no pass plays inside, and there were hardly any plays at all. There were calls about formations, blocking schemes, and play-action. There were play names, which weren't actually names but rather alphanumeric combinations indicating pass routes or maybe a particular number telling a particular running back to hit a particular hole. Everything read like programming language—all jargon and technical gibberish.

The playbook came from Madden. One day in the mid-1980s, it arrived at the desk of Ybarra, the EA producer tasked with turning Hawkins's vision into an actual working game.

"I start flipping through," Ybarra said, "and I think to myself, 'These poor people—how the hell do they ever play football if they have to know all this crap?'"

Montana was out. Already had an endorsement deal with video game console maker Atari. Also out was Cal football coach Joe Kapp, Hawkins's second choice, who wanted royalties.

Enter Madden, who was impressed by Hawkins's pedigree and signed on.

"If this guy went to Harvard and made up his own major in games," the former coach said, "I figured he must be a computer genius."

Also enter 22 players on the screen, Ybarra's professional death march. The erstwhile high school chess champ became an office masochist, logging 18-hour days, helming as many as 17 games at the same time. That was doable, par for EA's start-up years. But the Madden-endorsed product was torture.

"All my memories," Ybarra said, "are of pain."

Some of the pain was technical: making a game on a computer, the Apple II, that didn't have enough memory, pixels, or disk storage. No sound chip either, and only one joystick port. The machine could produce four colors, sure, but only if a programmer knew all the dirty tricks. Anything beyond seven-on-seven football caused the on-screen action to slow to a crawl.

"We were trying to model NFL football," Ybarra said, "on a computer with less horsepower than your watch."

Some of the pain was financial. Just as EA brought its first games to market in 1983, the home video game industry imploded. In a two-year span, Coleco abandoned the business, Intellivision went from 1,200 employees to five, and Atari infamously dumped thousands of unsold game cartridges into a New Mexico landfill. Toy retailers bailed, concluding that video games were a Cabbage Patch-style fad. Even at EA—a hot home computer start-up—continued solvency was hardly assured.

"It was like being the newest superhero on a planet that is falling apart and into the sun," former EA producer Don Daglow said. "We didn't know if our superpowers would be enough to defeat those market conditions."

The biggest pain was conceptual: What was a football simulation supposed to look like? How should it play? "Football" on the Atari 2600 console featured three-man teams composed of players who resembled and moved like ambulatory kitchen appliances. Everything was new: play-calling boxes; an "oomph" (read: turbo) button. Ybarra tried a TV-style camera angle. Finding holes at the line of scrimmage proved impossible. He switched to the god's-eye end-zone perspective still used in today's games. The game played better, but it still looked like bleeding Lego blocks.

During the two-day Amtrak ride with Madden, Hawkins and Ybarra quizzed the former coach from dawn to midnight, breaking down passing trees and line stunts and digesting game plans. Ybarra disembarked with blurry eyes, a splitting headache, and a legal pad full of notes.

"We spent hours just learning blocking schemes," he said. "By the third year of the project, I could watch pro football on TV and tell you what was going to happen when the players were still lining up."

Development dragged. A single programmer, Robin Antonick, slaved away on the code. Six months became three years. At the time, the average game took 15 months to make. More than once, Madden himself figured EA had simply given up. An anxious Hawkins flirted with having an outside developer, Bethesda Soft-works, build the game. A short-lived business deal ended in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, later settled out of court.

"It was like Herbert Hoover," Hawkins said. "Prosperity is just around the corner."

Around EA's offices—a jock-friendly environment, home to Nerf ball fights, weekday golf outings, and the occasional shoving match—the Madden project earned a nickname: Trip's Folly.

"Most games that went as late as Madden and had that many struggles," Daglow said, "they'd take them out behind the barn and do the honorable thing."

Hawkins pressed on. Madden introduced him to Frank Cooney, a football beat writer for the
San Francisco Examiner.
Cooney and Madden went way back, having attended Bay Area high schools just five miles apart. Although the coach was a decade older than the scribe, the two had formed a friendship during Madden's time in Oakland. At heart, both were football nerds. As a side project, Cooney regularly attended the draft combine—unheard of in those days—and supplied scouting reports on college players to NFL and USFL teams. He also designed a figurine-based board game, Grid-Grid, that functioned like electric football, only with numeric skill ratings determining the outcome of player interactions.

"I had an idea," Cooney said, "that was waiting for the technology to catch up with it."

In Madden, Cooney found his tech. Although the game didn't have an NFL license—San Francisco's gold-helmeted digital quarterback was named 'Joe Idaho"—it did feature players rated in 10 categories. Thanks to Cooney, Idaho's passing arm had pinpoint accuracy. And that wasn't all.

"For our playbooks, I would say to Frank, 'Go find out what a team's five signature plays are,'" Hawkins said. "He would go up to the assistant coaches, hand them paper. And they would draw up plays! We collected a huge amount of plays that way."

In 1988, John Madden Football was released for the Apple II computer and became a modest commercial success. Ybarra had already left the project to make adventure games. Burned out, he didn't watch real-life pro football for an entire season. Meanwhile, a jubilant Hawkins approached Madden.

HAWKINS:
You stayed with me. EA is about to have an IPO [initial public offering]. You can have as much stock as you want.

MADDEN:
What do you mean by
have?

HAWKINS:
Well, you have to buy it—at the IPO price.

"Hell, I'm just a football coach," Madden says now. "I pointed with my finger, all knowing, and said, 'I gave you my time. I'm not giving you my money.' I showed him!"

From 1989 to 1999, EA's share price went from $7.50 to $70. Madden laughs. "That was the dumbest thing I ever did in my life."

The stakes were high for a pair of upstart game makers, with a career-making opportunity and a $100,000 development contract on the line. In early 1990, Troy Lyndon and Mike Knox of San Diego-based Park Place Productions met with Hawkins to discuss building a Madden game for Sega's upcoming home video game console, the Genesis. Near the end of the meeting, Hawkins popped a surprise question to the duo: "Are you going to build the game I want to make or the game you want to make?"

"My answer might have been, 'Whatever you want,'" said Lyndon, now head of Left Behind Games, a Christian video game maker. "But before I could open my mouth, Mike says, 'The game I want to make.' I was like, 'Dude, I hope that was the right answer!'"

It was. Because the game that made Madden a phenomenon wasn't the initial Apple II release, it was the Genesis follow-up, a surprise smash spawned by an entirely different mindset. Hawkins wanted Madden to play out like the NFL. Equivalent stats. Similar play charts. Real football.

By contrast, Lyndon and Knox previously had made a well-received Monday Night Football title featuring arcade-style, action-heavy game play. That clicked with Genesis Madden producer Rich Hilleman, whose top design priority was fun—a game with more sacks, more bombs, more tackles in the backfield, and more 60-yard runs than real-life NFL football. Something akin to an episode of
The Hills,
or what philosopher/author Umberto Eco dubbed the "hyperreal"—seemingly authentic, yet more entertaining than the genuine article.

"I came to the game from making flight simulations," said Hilleman, who is now EA's chief creative officer. "If you make an F-16 fighter simulation and it's very accurate, to fire a single missile takes like 20 procedures. Only that's not people's perception of being a pilot. People's perception is Tom Cruise. Push a button and blow something up. With Genesis Madden, we wanted to emphasize what makes football exciting, not perfectly replicate the brutality of a 3.1-yard-per-carry running game."

By 1989, EA had established itself in the home computer market, which was largely a realm of adult hobbyists and $2,000 machines. Game consoles were another story. Thanks to its wildly popular NES system—home to Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda—Japanese game maker Nintendo enjoyed a near monopoly on American living rooms, using that clout to treat companies producing NES games like feudal serfs, controlling game content, delivery, packaging, and profit distribution.