Retro Gaming Australia

John Madden Football ’92 is Madden’s second outing on home consoles and boasts a laundry list of improvements including EASN presentation, weather effects including rain and snow, new playbooks, instant replays and player injuries. The last one is a particularly amusing one – John Madden Football ’92 came at a time when EA didn’t have any official licenses and didn’t take itself seriously – when a player gets injured, an ambulance speeds onto the field, ploughing down any players unfortunate enough to get in its way. It’s really quite amusing.

John Madden Football is the game which really put Electronic Arts on the map as a viable developer of sports games. The first release for the Genesis and Mega Drive is actually the second game in the series – a series improvement over the original DOS release. It’s interesting to see that, once upon a time, Madden didn’t need official licenses or real players to sell.

Madden NFL ’95 is the first game in the Madden franchise to feature the licenses of both the NFL and NFL Players Association – real teams, real players.

It’s unbelievable when you think about what big business Madden NFL is for EA now, but once upon a time, the series didn’t actually carry the official licenses of the NFL or NFLPA – it had to make it on quality gameplay alone. John Madden NFL ’93 was the last 16-bit version to be released before EA managed to get an NFL license. A special Championship Edition of the game was released exclusively for rental in the United States and as such, a complete copy is among the rarer games on the system.

Madden NFL 99 is considered to be a major turning point for the series with the introduction of the franchise mode, which lets you take the helm of a team and steer them through fifteen seasons, chopping and changing your lineup to make it the best it can be. It was also the first of the Madden games on the PlayStation to feature 3D models for the players.

Despite being released 3 years into the 5th generation era, Madden NFL 98 was still using 2D sprites for its players – a factor that lead to Sony’s NFL GameDay 98 being the go to game for football fans in 1997 and 1998. While Madden NFL 99 would return the series to glory, the 98 game serves as a reminder that EA’s behemoth was not always invincible.

Madden NFL 97 marked the series’ debut on the PlayStation and Saturn, due to the cancellation of Madden NFL 96 for those platforms (and the PC) for quality control reasons – an unimaginable turn of events for today’s EA, who will release new Maddens without regard to quality. Amusingly, the developer behind the ill-fated Madden NFL 96 was Visual Concepts, who went on to develop the NFL 2K series for Sega.