Trivia / Madden NFL

• Approval of God: Greg Jennings is well aware of that time he scored a 99 yard touchdown with a broken leg, and has also revealed that the Madden achievement for doing the same being named after him became a topic of locker room conversations.
  "I thought it was the sweetest thing ever, I'm like "I finally made it!" I don't know if I was gonna ever make it in football, but I made it on YouTube, so there it is."
• Cash-Cow Franchise: Arguably the cash cow franchise for EA alongside FIFA. It frequently pops up in Top 10 sales lists despite being a yearly release.
• Cast the Expert: Several early 2000s versions featured the voice of retired NFL referee Red Cashion^note known for his drawn-out "First doooowwwwnnnn!" calls; later in the decade, he was replaced by then-active referee Ed Hochuli.
• Christmas Rushed: A new version of the game is released every year, and must be available by the start of the real life NFL season. Naturally, this leads to many of the Obvious Beta issues and bugs encountered each year.
• Colbert Bump: The New York Times published EA stats of Madden teams' usage for the 2010 season. Randy Moss, a physically talented but hard to handle athlete, changed teams twice during the season and a significant chunk of players followed him around the league, using the teams he played for most.
• Creator's Apathy:
  • Madden 06 had a nasty bug Game-Breaking Bug which would break Franchise Mode and could even corrupt players' save data. When this came to light, instead of doing anything to fix the problem, Electronic Arts indicated that they didn't care about the game's crippling glitch and were not going to patch it, instead encouraging them to buy the next year's version.
  • Madden 23 had a bug strike Online Franchise mode from December 28-29, 2022 (during many players' holiday vacations) which caused nearly 60% of those who logged in to permanently corrupt their save files. EA's official solution was to start over.
• Distanced from Current Events:
  • Some athletes were removed or had their role reduced due to their involvement in controversies:
    • Ray Rice's removal from the Madden NFL 15 roster was done in order to prevent his assault on his wife from sullying the game's reputation.
    • In 20, Tyreek Hill was not given a Superstar ability despite his ratings being deserving of one due to his involvement in an ugly domestic violence investigation. Later in the season, Myles Garrett had his Superstar ability removed after getting into a violent on-field fight.
    • In 22, Madden removed former Raiders coach Jon Gruden and former Raiders receiver Henry Ruggs III after a couple of high-profile disgraces in a span of three weeks; Gruden when league emails regarding an unrelated investigation leaked out with him using multiple instances of racist, misogynistic, and homophobic language (causing him to be fired-via-resignation)^note Gruden's likeness was replaced by a generic coach, whereas typically EA leaves in coaches even if they're fired mid-season, and Ruggs when he was involved in a car crash that killed a woman and her dog while he was driving 156 mph at more than double the legal blood alcohol limit (he was swiftly released while facing multiple felonies and a long prison sentence)^note EA removed him from the game completely instead of removing him from the Raiders roster into the free agent pool.
  • After Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed during a game due to cardiac arrest, necessitating CPR to restart his heart, EA removed the post-touchdown celebration of a player pretending to give a teammate CPR.
• Executive Veto: Madden outright refused to put his name on the six-man football prototype EA first showed him, forcing the project to be shelved until 16-bit consoles came around which could handle full 11-man teams. Amusingly, six man football returned in Madden 21 via a backyard football inspired game mode called "The Yard."
• In Memoriam:
  • Madden 25 (the game released in 2013) is dedicated to Pat Summerall, John Madden's longtime broadcasting partner, who died about four months before the release date.
  • Madden 23 featured multiple covers starring Madden himself as a tribute to him after he passed away in 2021, making it the first time he's appeared on a series cover since '01. It Cold Opens with an AFC-NFC John Madden memorial game, with two versions of Madden each coaching one squad, played in a digital recreation of the 1970s-era Oakland Coliseum where he spent his NFL career.
  • Carried over from real life, the Ravens have the "MO" in Baltimore painted a gold in their endzone to honor the late Mo Gaba, a superfan who died in 2020.
• Killer App:
  • Initially for the Sega Genesis. The series quickly became Multi-Platform and has remained as such ever since.
  • Inverted when it came to the Sega Dreamcast. The lack of Madden on the system is cited as one of the major contributing factors to the console's demise.
• Life Imitates Art:
  • Some unorthodox football strategies gained acceptance in the real NFL in part because Madden made them common knowledge amongst football fans. These include going for it on 4th down in your own territory, running parallel to the goal line to burn off extra seconds when leading late in the game, and deliberately stopping at the one yard line to burn off more time rather than scoring. The "running parallel to the goal line" is an interesting twist. In reality, this play has occurred at least as far back as Buccaneers safety Neal Colzie's interception return in the 1981 season opener, showing that it existed before Madden. However, the modern generation of football players (and even a good number of coaches) are going to recognize the strategy much more from playing Madden. This makes Colzie's return something of an Unbuilt Trope for the strategy.
  • The mid-'00s iterations of the game used the order teams were eliminated from the playoffs to determine draft order, rather than the overall record the league used at the time. (For example, an 11-5 team who lost in the wild card round would draft before a 9-7 team who lost in the divisional round, whereas in real life it was the other way around.) Only the two Super Bowl participants deviated from this order. In 2009, the NFL passed a rule change changing the draft order to what Madden was already doing.
• Milestone Celebration: The 2014 game (released in August 2013) was titled as "Madden 25", celebrating the franchise's 25th anniversary. ^note It was titled after the anniversary rather than the edition - it's the 26th entry in the series.
• No Port For You:
  • There has not been an entry released for a Nintendo platform since Madden 13.
  • As noted under Killer App, the Dreamcast never had an installment released for it (though it at least had the NFL 2K games to fill the void).
• The Production Curse: Had one so famous that it became its own Pop Culture Urban Legend — the Madden Curse, and was the former trope namer. Every year for nearly two decades, the cover athlete typically saw a decline in success and/or suffered an injury. A major component in the "curse" was the "Regression Toward the Mean" fallacy. Typically, the cover athlete was coming off of an incredible season in which they won awards and/or a Super Bowl, so regression was common. The "curse" was finally considered to have been broken when Patrick Mahomes, the cover athlete of Madden 20, won the Super Bowl that year and made it back the year after.
• Screwed by the Network: A major reason why the Sega Dreamcast died after about two years on the market was partially because Sega could not successfully negotiate with Electronic Arts with releasing this series on their system. A lot of this breakdown happened due to EA wanting greater control over the online modes. EA also had these same demands of Microsoft, but that company was considerably more flexible. Ironically, the original Sega Genesis version of this game was one of the consoles's first big titles (pre-Sonic) and helped it gain popularity over the Nintendo Entertainment System in the US.
• Vaporware:
  • Ubisoft was going to make NES and Game Boy versions of John Madden Football '93, but both of these were unreleased. Madden '95, '96, and '97 were released on the Game Boy, but no Madden games were ever released on the NES.
  • During the rollout of Xbox "Smartglass", a companion app for the 360 which would allow you to use a second screen from a phone or tablet, the developers showed a functional prototype for Madden and promised it was coming soon. It was never released on the 360, instead being re-worked into "Coach Glass", an Xbox One exclusive.
  • The PS1 port of Madden 96 was heavily hyped and was supposed to be the franchise's first foray in the 32-bit arena. It was canceled, however, with EA stating that it wasn't up to the "quality of publishing standards" for the company. The series wouldn't truly leap into the third dimension until Madden 99.
• What Could Have Been: In 23, EA added John Madden as a player for the first time, with elite stats. In the real world, Madden was injured in his first season, and never played in a regulation NFL game before turning to coaching.

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