Sports Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 491

THE MADDEN NFL SERIES

Madden NFL is one of the longest-established and best-selling game franchises in the history of the industry.
From its earliest beginnings on the Apple II, it has grown into a financial powerhouse that produces a new edition
on several different platforms every year and makes millions of dollars for its publisher, Electronic Arts. Versions
of Madden have appeared for personal computers and every major console machine ever produced.
Madden is not redesigned every year, nor is its code rewritten. Electronic Arts updates its artwork and video
sequences and adds new features each year, but it undertakes a complete overhaul only every four or five years —
often when a new generation of game console appears. The majority of the design work each year consists of
tuning and improving the gameplay and adding more features. These features expand the football experience
to include aspects of the sport that go beyond playing a single match against another team, including:

• Ability to hire and trade athletes among teams, subject to the limitations of the salary cap established by

the NFL.

• Participation in the NFL draft.

• Detailed performance statistics on athletes.

• Season, tournament, and practice modes.

• Franchise mode, letting players take a team through several seasons in an effort to build a dynasty.

• A play editor, allowing players to customize their playbooks.

• Training camp mode, in which the players can practice and get to know the capabilities of the athletes on their

team. Recent editions of Madden use this feature to collect data about the player's skills, and automatically
adjust the difficulty of the game to compensate.

• Adjustable AI, enabling players to set the coaching stances of computer-controlled teams to aggressive,

neutral, or conservative.

• Arcade mode, a simplified and exaggerated form of the game.

As you can see, even though the sport itself changes little from year to year, you can always add new features
and details to a sports game.
By far the largest single design task in developing Madden every year is research: rating the skills of the real ath-
letes who appear in the game, keeping track of which team they're playing for, finding photographs of them, and
so on. In addition to researching the athletes, the game developers must research the coaches — trying to find out
what kinds of plays they like to run, whether they're aggressive or conservative, and so on. The game developers
must also update each team's playbooks every year to reflect changes in coaching practice, and test the new plays
to make sure that they're effective but not unstoppable.

In short, Madden is a highly successful sports game that offers its players a wide range of playing styles, from the
quick and easy arcade game to the detailed minutiae of designing plays and adjusting rosters. As a game that
tries to do it all, it's well worth studying.