John Madden Football

About John Madden Football

John Madden Football (1988) is Electronic Arts' Apple II American football game, three years in the making as "Trip's Folly" because Madden insisted on eleven players a side, and the start of the Madden NFL series.

John Madden Football in Depth

The game lets the player customise many aspects of a match, including conditions, the length of quarters, player fatigue, injuries and penalties. A quick, arcade-like mode sits alongside a deeper standard game with detailed player statistics and plays the player can design. There is no season play, only single games, and with no NFL or NFLPA licence it has no real teams, player names or stadiums, although some teams are based on real ones; players can also build a team from scratch.

It was ported to MS-DOS and the Commodore 64 in 1989. The 1990 Sega Genesis game of the same name grew into the yearly Madden NFL series, so the original is sometimes called Madden '88 or Madden '89 to tell it apart.

Making John Madden Football

EA founder Trip Hawkins had long wanted a football game inspired by Strat-O-Matic's sports simulations. After Montana and Kapp turned him down, he approached John Madden two years later and reached an agreement. Fitting eleven players on each team was difficult with the technology of the time, and together with the Bethesda dispute this stretched development to three years. Inside EA the project became known as "Trip's Folly", and both staff and Madden himself assumed it would be cancelled. It came out in 1988 after EA's success with Earl Weaver Baseball, and Computer Gaming World reviewed it favourably for offering both its quick arcade mode and its detailed standard game.