So I am holding a copy of Madden 11 for the Nintendo Wii. I am going to be very frank with you: it sucks. Bad. I mean every single problem that was in the Maddens before was passed on to this installment like a horrid baton. And then to make things more exciting, they added more problems and bugs in this edition. I actually protested Madden for a couple of years before finally falling over and giving this game a shot after good critic reviews. However I have no idea where the critics could find improvements because I saw crap on top of crap served with a side of crap. The funniest thing is that the Wii version is the only one with the famed and decent Franchise Mode—even if it was very watered when compared to previous installments. Nonetheless, the makers of the game, EA Sports, will not suffer because of the garbage they have piled in this year’s edition because of a huge decision made many years ago that impacted the world of football and football games.If you are not truly protesting or voicing your disdain of EA Sports, my goal here is to convince you otherwise. I am about to tell you a story involving several gaming companies in competition and the one business decision that changed the world of video games forever. One company rises, several others fall, and the overall quality of sports games takes multiple steps backwards. This is the story that many people silently know, but will never tell. Are you prepared to hate big business yet again? Prepared to hate EA Sports? Let’s go.
Chapter One: Enter the Dreamcast
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September 9th, 1999 was the launch date. There was no EA to be found within the lineup of Dreamcast games. We can head back as far as 1995 as the reason. The Sega Saturn was an incredible disaster that led to major losses to all companies involved. This included EA Games, which had developed a nice relationship with Sega during the successful Genesis days. While there are rumors that the fallout of the relationship was more than just what happened with the Saturn, when you dwell deep enough you see that EA was predicting another mess of a console from Sega. So Sega turned to another company with previous fallout history with EA Games, which was Visual Concepts.
Back in the earlier 90s, Visual Concepts worked for EA Games until they were unable to release a Madden game in time for Playstation’s launch back in 1995. EA wound up having to play catch-up against NFL Gameday for a couple of years. EA separated themselves from Visual and went with a Florida-based company known as Tiburon. With Sega on their side, Visual Concepts was ready for revenge. Visual Concept’s NFL 2K was a huge hit, and looked a generation ahead of Madden’s mechanics at the time. The graphics, gameplay, commentary were all much better than anything we had seen from any other football video game. Madden’s counter-punch wouldn’t come until 2001 with the Playstation 2’s launch, which also killed the Dreamcast.
The Sega Dreamcast had only three things going for it: arcade game ports, fighting games (perhaps the best fighting game system in the history of time), and the sports games. The NFL 2K series continuously was pushing the limits, knocking past NFL Gameday and NFL Blitz to be the main football franchise to take on Madden. Despite those three factors, Sega in Japan announced that they would stop competing in the console department and would focus purely on games. While the Dreamcast showed some life in the States, in Japan they were largely ignored, and the sales just weren’t enough.
While the Dreamcast’s fast spiral to doom spelled bad news for Sega, it spelled excellent news for the rivalry. With Sega going to the same places Madden was at, Visual Concepts could take on the Madden games head-on.
Chapter Two: Madden’s Toughest Opponent
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Madden was winning in sales every year, but little by little the 2K series was creeping by, grabbing more attention and praise each year. Madden 2003 debuts Madden in an online world, and then Sega counters by partnering with sports giant ESPN to deliver ESPN NFL Football. Unfortunately for them, Madden 2004 was at its absolute peak in quality (in my opinion) and almost at its peak in sales. For those that truly remember, Madden 2004 introduced a variety of changes, improvements, enhancements, and ultimately certified Madden as the leader of the football gaming world, and EA Sports as the leader in sports game manufacturing. While the 2K series constantly was bringing out great title after great title, Madden 2004 was the champ of them all, at the time perhaps the best football video game ever created.
With ESPN NFL Football and Madden 2004 dominating the charts, all the other competitors were left in the dust. Gameday, Blitz, NFL Fever, Quarterback Club were just some of the NFL-licensed franchises that were totally forgotten and did nothing more but stand in the shadows of EA and Sega. Both Madden 2004 and ESPN NFL Football had an equal average score of 9/10 from the critics, while the gamers themselves were giving ESPN Football the slight edge in average scores. Sega knew they had to do something drastic in order to really gain a true advantage over Madden.
ESPN NFL 2K5 changed the gaming world forever. It would predate the Wii’s marketing strategy of advertising its much cheaper games to make the competitors look much more expensive. Picture this: a brand new game with the full-on ESPN presentation, many new features, the ability to connect online, and at an amazing price of just over 30 bucks cheaper than your typical new releases. But instead of cutting back on the features and presentation, ESPN NFL 2K5 contains the greatest presentation in the history of sports video games. To truly show what this ahead-of-the-curve video game introduced to gamers back in 2004, we shall quote Wikipedia:
“The game features a franchise mode with a SportsCenter feature hosted by Chris Berman. He outlines the games of the current week with his co-host Trey Wingo who talks about the latest injuries and free agent deals and trades during the season. Mel Kiper hosts the draft portion of the segment while Suzy Kolber reports from the sidelines. There is also weekly preparation for the coming week which allows the player to make decisions on training and preparation. The player can also create his or her own team deciding the team logos (over 10 area available), team name, the teams city, the teams stadium look and build, jersey's and how good the team is. It also has a feature called first-person football, which gives the player the experience on the field looking from the eyes of the players. There is also the traditional create-a-player mode.”
Some of these features don’t even make it to modern-day Madden games (Create-a-team, create-a-player). Other features released in 2004 would still become superior to the latest Madden installments (best example being the halftime show, which was much better in 2K5). ESPN NFL 2K5 was easily among the best football games of all-time, if not the greatest football game of all-time. It was also definitely the best gaming deal of the past generation, by not scaling back in anything yet still selling at a cheap 20 bucks. While Madden 2005 was met with decent praise from gamers (slightly lower score in PS2, higher scores in Gamecube and XBox installments) and the best sales in the history of Madden (4.4 million copies worldwide in the PS2 version), the impact of NFL 2K5 was quite powerful. The scores from critics were phenomenally high for a sports game, and to this day people still use this game for their football gaming fix. Thanks to backwards-compatibility, 2K5 has developed a new life for a new generation of gamers. With over 3 million copies sold, it was quite a nasty bite. The experimental technique was a resounding success.
Of course, to add to the mayhem, the gaming equivalent to the Academy Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, handed ESPN NFL 2K5 the award for Sports Game of the Year. It was just like what happened with Rocky and Rocky II, while (SPOILER ALERT) Rocky did lose the fight in the original movie, he gave such an amazing effort that the champ didn’t really feel like much of a champ, and the public started second-guessing his worth. No biography or documentary about EA will never admit this, but I can guarantee you they were scared. What were to happen if all the other competitors did similar actions and dropped prices on their games? Then Madden would become not only expensive, but more of a hassle to purchase.
The underdog landed a nasty right hook to the champ. Rocky II (SPOILER ALERT, Rocky wins) was clearly about to happen, very soon. But the counter-attack was underway.
To Be Continued......
Sources:
vgcharts.org
IGN.com
wikipedia.org
gamestats.com
gamespot.com
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