Strictly speaking, It’s All In The Game doesn’t really end in 2006. All throughout, this documentary has contextualized the history of John Madden Football alongside the contemporary development and release of Madden NFL 25. That’s just where the retro part of the story ends, as the only “classic” Madden titles this episode discusses, if you really want to describe them that way, are 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. While the depth on these games is decent, the second half of the fourth episode is almost entirely contemporary Madden.
Worse, it’s cloyingly sentimental. That might be an odd sounding criticism coming from a retro gaming publication, but there’s a fine line between appreciating how archaic technology and culture differs from the present day and just turning that sentiment into an overly sappy commercial. Random cameos from NFL players and other celebrities discussing their experiences in past episodes was neat because they were contextualized within specific cultural trends like hip-hop music or game design choices. The closest to a real hook this episode has is the development of Superstar mode in Madden NFL 07. Except there’s frustratingly little discussion of how and why the original team came up with that idea, particularly when we learn the silly detail of the game programmers casting themselves as sports agents. Mostly it’s just the Madden NFL 25 team talking up the greatness of the feature.
Some good, strong material involves the discussion of gamebreaking plays, or money plays, in Madden NFL 2004. These have always been a part of the game, but once Madden went online, it turned out that Michael Vick and the Atlanta Falcons he played with were so comically overpowered the leaderboard literally just consisted of Atlanta Falcons players. Madden’s reputation for this was bad enough that Sega made a point in their own ESPN NFL 2K5 advertisements that their game didn’t have these kinds of unintentional balancing problems. Michael Vick was a good player, but Electronic Arts clearly didn’t intend for him to be that good, given the effort they went through to try and fix this bug.
Bugs alone, of course, don’t account for ESPN NFL 2K5 beating Madden NFL 2005. As anyone who followed gaming news at the time knows, the main reason that happened was because ESPN NFL 2K5 retailed for $20 while Madden NFL 2005 still went for the regular $50. Then in one of the more notorious sucker punches in gaming history, Electronic Arts acquired an exclusive NFL license, effectively killing off any possible competition. It’s In The Game doesn’t dwell on this, rather unsurprisingly since the documentary was sponsored by Electronic Arts and even uses their trademarked slogan as the title. What little material there is suggests that it was actually the NFL that decided they wanted an exclusive license in response to the ESPN NFL 2K5 price drop, that was done without consulting them first. Although even if this is what happened, it doesn’t explain why the NFL also decided to punish every other developer too and not just Sega Sports.
The programmers, of course, had nothing to do with this decision, so they can’t really speak to the motivation. They do argue that Madden NFL 2006 was awful, not due to the lack of competition but due to the lack of restraint. Basically, that they were cramming so many new features into the game that every player looked like Brett Favre three weeks before release, and the new features themselves didn’t work so hot either since resources were spread so thin. It’s a far cry from Madden NFL ’96 being cancelled entirely since nineties era Electronic Arts had some shame back then about putting out a substandard product.
It’s In The Game documents a lot of genuinely interesting, new material about the history of Madden NFL Football and repackages many of the better-known facts into a remarkably coherent grand narrative. But given the access required for such a project, ultimately, it’s not a big surprise that the documentary crew couldn’t drift too far off from the official Electronic Arts line and was only able to seriously discuss a relatively minor assortment of flaws from the distant past.
The post It’s In The Game Episode 4 Review: Amazon Prime Documentary Covers the Madden Franchise to 2006 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.
