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.

Sometimes I think it’s amazing that the people who managed Sony Imagesoft as it put out one godawful game after another were the very same people who fostered the success of the PlayStation. ESPN Baseball Tonight was one such “gem”.