IRRC, he also said he focused on explaining the game to someone who wasn’t a fan yet. It sometimes drove lifetime enthusiasts nuts, but I appreciated that he saw his role as making a complex game accessible.
Pre-1970s: Dracula
1970s-2000s: Scaramanga
2000s: Count Dooku/Saruman
― john madden
I’m reminded of the “software is just ifs and loops” post from weeks back. I had that opinion when I started, lost it for 15 years and find it returning more and more.
Sports video games, and Madden in particular, helped mainstream gaming and computing in a very real way. I hope EA brings him back to the cover one last time next year.
I'm glad I didn't quote the game (or worse, say "boom, tough actin tinactin"), but it was definitely interesting to have thought "Huh, what a wild life. Now he's just an old man who wants a sandwich like anyone else".
More importantly, perhaps he cut a line, I wasn't there and don't know. But literally everybody he worked with, who interacted with him for years or decades, insists he was gracious, generous, and kind. It's not right to mention your single interaction without countering with the thousands of people who loved this man.
One more anecdote. In 1978, during a preseason game, Jack Tatum of Madden's Raiders put a hit on New England's Darryl Stingley that paralyzed him for life. Madden, not New England's coach, and not Tatum, visited Stingley in the hospital that night. And the next day. And the day after that. And regularly, for weeks and months. He opened his house to Stingley and his wife. He returned from away games and immediately drove up to check on Stingley. He had no obligation, no responsibility, he just thought it was important to do.
Modden NFL helped demonstrate technology really well in a variety of ways that was fun and interesting to people who didn't see the appeal in video games like Pac Man. It was definitely a big contributor to getting more people into electronic interactive content.
I'm pretty sure I saw him coach in the 70's but my fondest memories of him are as a broadcaster in the 80's and 90's.
No matter how trivial the thing he said was you felt like you had just received critical knowledge directly from the football Gods. (Because you did!)
> Madden's Game: we look back at how John Madden went from being a football player and coach to the conscience of a billion dollar video game franchise that has stayed true to the sport itself.
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/31215567/coach-broadcast...
Looks like he may have been responsible for at least inspiring the digital first down line that's just part of the broadcast now. It's not all football stuff, though.
Hard to know who famous people really are, but he seemed to be a pretty good dude.
One thing I remember that I rarely read about is him being involved with marketing for Florsheim shoes. My dad had extra wide feet and for whatever reason the Florsheim dress shoes were the ones he liked to wear for work. On a couple of occasions as a kid I got dragged along with him to the Florsheim store in the mall so he could get shoes. I think this was in the mid-to-late 80s. They had what was basically a video game cabinet, except it was like a guided sales catalog or shoe picker, and it was narrated by John Madden. At least it was something I could mess with instead of sitting around looking at shoes.
EDIT: for the downvoters: I was referring to Stan Lee's twitter account now being used to shill NFTs, and saw John Madden as the next logical target of that behavior. Said it tongue in cheek. I'll keep my jokes to myself from now on.
You’ll be missed.
