Business lesson from NFL legend and video game pioneer John Madden: never compromise on authenticity

(Representational photo) More than anything else, there is the genuineness of American football’s popularity, of its cultural importance, of its demands.

There’s something about American football.

There’s the glamour and the fanfare and the money, sure. There’s the lore around it, and its celluloid representation (Any Given Sunday, Jerry MaGuire). There are the personalities. Johnny Unitas who’d rather press mud in his bleeding nose and continue to play than take an injury timeout. Joe ‘Broadway’ Namath who’d score a Super Bowl upset by day and turn fur coat-wearing party-hopper by night. Joe Montana, who had the mind and the arm to throw game-clinching passes that would fly smoothly across the yards into the waiting hands of a teammate. Perhaps he was assembled at Pratt & Whitney.

But more than anything else there is the genuineness of American football’s popularity, of its cultural importance, of its demands. It’s a big ball they throw, nearly a foot-long and weighing nearly half a kilo. They throw it hard. You may or may not be a fan of Colin Kaepernick’s knee, but his arm could launch. At the 2011 NFL Combine, Kaepernick threw at 59 miles per hour (the mark has been bettered since). Offensive players often touch Olympic sprinting times when they outrun SUV-sized defence players.

And that is why American football appeals to true students of sport even though they may not fully understand the game’s rules.

That is why, when John Madden died on December 28 at age 85, we read his obituaries.

An outsized Boris Yeltsin-type of presence, a Super Bowl champion coach, a winner of 16 Sports Emmys for his colour-meets-analysis commentary, a man squeamish about flying who travelled to games on a customised bus, often with reporters and a lot of food in tow. John Madden was all that. (His signature dish was the ‘turducken’ – turkey stuffed with duck and chicken).

Madden was also a successful businessman who lent his name and insights to a popular football video game made by EA Sports. Since its inception in 1988, John Madden Football has earned some $7 billion in revenue.

According to GOBankingRates.com, EA Sports paid Madden a $150 million lumpsum for perpetual rights to use his name. In addition, he earned yearly fees from the company.

John Madden in 2007

It was on an Amtrak rail journey in 1984, the great early period of the video game and tech boom, that EA Sports founder and Apple alumnus Trip Hawkins pitched the idea of a game to Madden.

Due to the primitive technology of the time, Hawkins proposed a game with seven players on each team, instead of eleven. The Apple II computer the game was being designed for did not have enough memory, pixels or disk storage to create 22 players on screen. It did not have a sound chip. And at best it could have four colours.

"We were trying to model NFL football on a computer with less horsepower than your watch," Joe Ybarra, Hawkins’ colleague, who was present at the Amtrak meeting, recalled to ESPN.

Right off, it became clear that Madden would not compromise on authenticity. If Big John was going to be involved, they were not going to mess with sacred fundamentals. Madden was also particular about details such as the position of the referees on the field.

“If it's not 11-on-11, it's not real football,” Madden told ESPN. “If it was going to be me, and going to be pro football, it had to have 22 guys on the screen. If we couldn't have that, we couldn't have a game.”

Those days, it took about 15 months for a game to be developed. But EA Sports had to toil over the Madden challenge for three years.

"All my memories [of working on the game] are of pain," Ybarra told ESPN.

The torturous, 18-hour work days paid off. John Madden Football became a hit. According to the New York Times, it has sold 130 million copies from 1988 to 2018.

Over time, the EA team became annual guests at Madden’s famous man cave, with multiple screens like in a TV studio, in Pleasantown, California. NYT wrote that Madden would hold court there over breakfast burritos and ice cream sundaes. They’d watch and talk football. And Madden would quiz the EA boys about further plans for the game.

“He would not be afraid to stop you mid-pitch and question you on your football knowledge or ask you to validate why something was worth the investment, and you damn sure better have known what you were talking about,” Rex Dickson, who was the creative director of Madden NFL from 2012 to 2018, told NYT.

And that is how one of the great chapters in sports and business came to be. “Boom!” to that, as Madden would say.