Image via Complex Original
The Madden franchise has been the leader in football video games for nearly 25 years. Throughout the quarter-centrury reign, Madden has maintained its position by staying true to the authenticity of the real-life game. We've pulled together The 15 Greatest Madden Games of All Time as a tribute to the title that we have to have day one of each release.
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1. John Madden Football
Cover Star: John Madden (Wearing A Polo)
Year: 1988
Everything has to start with something. The Big Bang. The American Revolution. That anarchist shooting Franz Ferdinand and starting World War I. The lost pilot for Star Trek where Lloyd Bridges played the captain. John Madden Football. John Madden wasn't just bursting through a chalkboard on the cover of that game. He was bursting through history.
2. Madden NFL 13
Cover Star: Calvin Johnson
Year: 2012
The newest iteration of the Madden games features a slew of new features that make you almost wonder if in the age of all-integrated-everything, the EA dudes were trying to recreate life itself in Madden NFL 13. Will the voice activation features available with XBox Kinect become a staple of the franchise? Probably! Will this go down in history as the only Madden to ever feature an in-game Twitter feed? Maybe! But it all feels very modern, very today, very Madden. Anyways, cover star Calvin Johnson set the single-season receiving yards record this year and nothing public and horrible happened to his personal life this year, though, so somehow that detracts from this game's quality.
3. Madden 64
Cover Star: John Madden (Wearing A Suit)
Year: 1997
Madden 64 was a weird little spleen of a game, one where for some reason you couldn't play as any actual NFL teams, but you could play in 3D! Anyways, playing Madden 64 back in the day was like opening a portal to an entirely new dimension of sports games, but now it kinda looks weird. Even though NFL QB Club had the exclusive rights to the NFL player names, Madden 64 did harness the full power of the Rumble Pak. Why didn't EA just set Madden 64 in the actual year of 1964? No one knows, but this game's existence is gonna be really inconvenient if the Madden series makes it to 2064.
4. Madden NFL 2003
Cover Star: Marshall Faulk
Year: 2002
While some remember Madden 2003 for being the first Madden to let you play online, I prefer to remember it as the Madden with the most hilariously dated soundtrack of all time: Good Charlotte. Quarasi. OK Go. Andrew W.K. Motherfucking Seether. With all due respect to the time I saw Seether open for Nickelback, there's no way this can crack the Top Ten. Pro Tip: If you ever want to experience the modern-day equivalent of a ghost town, just boot up a game like Madden 2003 and try to start a game with somebody online. Shit's eerie.
5. Madden NFL 07
Cover Star: Shaun Alexander
Year: 2006
Oh man, I totally swear that the Madden Curse is a Thing. Take Shaun Alexander, who appeared on the cover of Madden NFL 07 and proceeded to systematically have a roller-coaster season that helped lead to the demise of his career: He broke his foot in Week 3 of the 2006 season, only to finish the season playing on said broken foot while breaking Barry Sanders' record for most consecutive games with a 10-yard plus run. The motherfucker of the thing is the Madden Curse is like a 007 agent, or at least a TMZ blogger; it will not stop until your life is ruined. In 2007 Shaun Alexander fractured his wrist, lost his lead blocker, sprained his knee and ankle, and then was frozen in carbonite. Somewhere, John Madden cackled and gazed thirstily at some turducken.
6. Madden NFL 98
Cover Star: John Madden (Wearing A Tie But No Suit Jacket)
Year: 1997
The mid-to-late-'90s were a weird fucking time in America. Bill Clinton had thrust the nation into a scandal that dredged up uncomfortable questions about how our private lives should inform our public ones. Shakespeare In Love won Best Picture over a Terrence Malick film and two movies about World War II. The craziest shit of all? Two Madden games came out in 1997. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but Shakespeare In Love was directed by a guy named John Madden. Okay, so actually the thing was the EA Sports dudes wanted to make a game that harnessed the unfathomable, 64-bit power of the Nintendo 64 so they made Madden Football 64, but they couldn't use NFL team names because the Quarterback Club franchise had the exclusive rights for Nintendo systems. So they ended up putting out two games. Much like the time Nelly released two albums at once, the less ambitious one is way better.
7. Madden NFL 09
Cover Star: Brett Favre (No Crocs)
Year: 2008
You could play it on an iPhone! It had Impact Plays! Madden Tests that tailored the game's difficulty to your skill level! (Or lack thereof!) This one gets points off because as per the conditions of the karmic chupacabra that is the Madden Curse, it eventually caused Brett Favre to send a picture of his flaccid penis to a woman while he was wearing Crocs. Peace to the Hologram John Madden; that would prove oddly prophetic.
8. Madden NFL 2000
Cover Star: John Madden (Wearing A Headset And Ominously Shaking His Finger While Barry Sanders Evades A Tackle In The Background)
Year: 1999
Madden NFL 2000 was great because EA finally had finally developed the technology to give the Madden games a decent franchise mode. The inherent problem with the Madden games is also its most lucrative aspect: They have to come out every single year, or else. This means that every single year, EA Sports has to give consumers reasons to come back to the well. While things like an expanded franchise mode are cool and ultimately necessary to a series' evolution, at some point any developer runs out of meaningful changes to make. This leads to bullshit like in-game Twitter feeds and 34,687 permutations of a Create-A-Player's face, which are technically editions to the franchise but vestigial at best. Also, the hyper-accelerated system of planned obsolescence incorporated in the Madden games is sort endemic of what's wrong with capitalism, but whatever.
9. John Madden Football '92
Cover Star: Two Generic Football Dudes, One Of Whom Is Falling
Year: 1991
As advanced humans in 2013, we would be unimpressed if a football game was released touting its four weather conditions, in-game injuries and a totally-existent instant replay option. But in 1991, this was enough to satiate the gaming cavemen populating the universe. When your player got hurt an ambulance came and picked him up and would knock hella dudes out of the way to carry that one guy to safety. If Buster Keaton were making this list, this would be his number-one.
10. Madden NFL 11
Cover Star: Drew Brees
Year: 2010
EA Sports is pretty vigilant in terms of how much attention they pay to people griping about shit online. But then again, if you're a game developer, looking at message boards is basically free crowdsourcing. Madden 11 saw EA satiating the will of angry nerds everywhere by taking the game's kicking system back from the joysticks to the buttons LIKE GOD MEANT IT TO BE, smartening up the AI, realistic-ing up the physics, and generally making the game a lot more fun to play while not making it so complex you couldn't enjoy it when you were drunk and/or stoned. Madden 11 remains the pinnacle of the modern Madden era, but its terrifying perfection indicates the complete and utter lack of soul of pretty much every important video game in the past five years.
11. Madden NFL 2004
Cover Star: Mike Vick
Year: 2003
The big draw of this one was EA introduced the world to Ownership Mode, basically turning Madden into The Sims, letting you control everything from how much it costs for people to park at your stadium. While it didn't have anything inherently to do with football, it did give a generation of lonely teenagers (*raises hand*) a premature lesson in microeconomics-if your team was awesome, you could charge whatever you wanted for a tuna melt; if they sucked, eh, it might be a good move to make the parking free. If I recall correctly, this is also the year that EA said, "Fuck it" and made Mike Vick the most powerful football video game player since Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl.
12. Madden NFL 2010
Cover Star: Troy Polamalu and Larry Fitzgerald
Year: 2009
Yes, Madden NFL 10 is two slots in front of Madden NFL 11 despite me saying Madden NFL 11 was the pinnacle of modern Maddenonity. This is because Madden NFL 10 found John Madden's gobbly, reductive ass being fully sent out to pasture, allowing the golden throats of Tom Hammond and Chris Collinsworth to provide all the commentary. While this didn't resolve Madden NFL 10's issues with physics or actually being, like, fun, it was still way less likely that you muted Madden NFL 10 in favor of literally any other sound including silence. Madden NFL 10 might have been the equivalent of a King Crimson album in that it managed to be immersive and complicated thought not necessarily fun, but then again some people are really, really into King Crimson, and we have to respect that.
13. Madden NFL 2001
Cover Star: Eddie George
Year: 2000
Madden NFL 2001 symbolizes a hard cut between the Maddens of yore and the Maddens of today, mainly because it was one of the titles that helped launch the Playstation 2 back in 2000 which meant that it could have all sorts of graphical goodies. Place yourself in the heads of the sheeple unwrapping the plastic on Madden 2001, ready to have a whole new dimension of interactive sports entertainment explode upon their entire being. Did they get it? Probably! Either way, this game's PS2 iteration was such an immense increase in verisimilitude from Madden NFL 2000 that it warrants such high placement on this list.
14. Madden NFL 2005
Cover Star: Ray Lewis
Year: 2004
Can the Madden series ever approach perfection in a meaningful sense? If a Madden game were to ever truly be perfect, it would render the need for a new edition completely and utterly moot, because a perfect Madden would be the most it possibly could be given the day's technology, and it would also be smart enough to automatically upgrade itself when rosters needed to be swapped out or the game otherwise improved-upon. While Madden 2005 isn't so immaculate that it punches God in the dick or anything, it comes as close as a Madden title ever has. Madden 2005 boned up the defensive elements of the game, including defensive hot routes as well as the "Hit Stick," which set the stage for the hilariously-named "Truck Stick." However, Madden 2005 tends to get overrated especially when stacked up against the relative orgasm of terrible that is Madden NFL 06, so it doesn't take the number one spot on this list.
15. Madden NFL 94
Cover Star: John Madden (Looking Austere And Full Of Knowledge)
Year: 1993
This is where it all came together. Fuck getting the band back together; Madden NFL 94 is when the band goddamn started. Madden 94 was so technologically groundbreaking that it might as well have been a Star Wars prequel. It was the first to carry the NFL's blessing, as well as the first to feature a smart camera that wouldn't automatically flip around on you right when you didn't want it to. Madden as a commentator was at his most endearing in that he was only capable of saying like four things, one of which was "BOOM!" Madden NFL 94 also allowed you to play a whole season all the way through, as well as call "Bluff Plays," aka you could trick whoever was sitting next to you trying to screen watch on you by highlighting one play and choosing another (Bluff Plays have since been replaced with "Hoping Your Friend Isn't Looking At Your Half Of The Screen" which is stupid). It was the perfect balance of ridiculous and real-you'd pick a team, choose your plays and march the football down the field to glory, or you didn't. Either way, there would be a halftime show.