The Madden NFL football video game has been a cornerstone to American football for the last 25 years, but in that timeEA Sports has been told there are things they can do and things they can’t do.
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According to Jon Robinson at SI’s Extra Mustard, the NFL has strict guidelines on what they would allow and what they never want to see. The list includes some things that you would expect such as de-helmeting, concussion imagery, hit stick violence, celebrations, bystanders getting leveled and game owners defacing NFL teams.
Those are the ones that the average person can understand, but where it gets fishy is when the NFL asked EA to get rid of the ambulance in 2000 and dynamic attendance in 2010.
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Yes, it is a video game but the idea of an ambulance taking away injured players always seemed a bit much. The NFL thought so too when they asked to have it removed. An executive at EA remembers when the NFL came calling.
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“They did not want to see a player strapped to a backboard, motionless,” says the second producer. “That was a hard restriction, given to us in the mid-2000s. If a guy was carted off the field, he had to be moving around, not paralyzed.”
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The other issue the NFL had is one that a lot less serious than injured players. With dynamic attendance the game would estimate how many fans would be visible in accordance with what the teams average was year in and year out. Guess what team had a problem with that? If you guessed the Jaguars *ding* *ding* *ding*
"We incorporated accurate attendance for all the teams, and Jacksonville always had these terrible turnouts," says one producer. "The Jags owner got all pissed off when he heard there were empty seats when you played as his team in the game. The team called the NFL and we had to fix it immediately.”
You can read Robinson’s Madden article in full here
Madden is entering it’s 26th year as the official game of the NFL and it seems to be going strong in sales and its license. One lesson to take away from this story is that the NFL gets what the NFL wants and a happy NFL pays dividends to all associated with them.
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