Every so often Game-Rave.com takes a step outside the variants and long boxes to explore games that never made it to public hands, or at least in American gamers’ hands. Join in as Game-Rave explores legends and tales never told.
Overview and History
(Originally published August 30, 2012)
It’s a game report that had to be done, and it had to be done right. This was the biggest part of it – how to properly catalog and present every last nook and cranny of the cancellation heard around the world – Madden NFL ’96.
Madden NFL ’96, across all platforms, began life in November of 1995** according to the game’s producer Mike Rubinelli. Coming off a strong 16-bit year and heading into the title match between the 32-bit Sega Saturn, the PlayStation, and 3DO, EA knew they had to get software out at launch, and that had to include their flagship title.
In an interview with Dam Amrich of GameSport, Rubinelli discussed how at the time EA was taking fan mail to see if what the players wanted was matching up to what the designers had in mind. Admitting a 90% match ratio, the team felt they were on the right track to release on the new platforms. Said Rubinelli, “Give the user everything they expect, and then some. So it is with 32-bit as well; they expect the 3-D stuff, the big guys, cool digital audio, and beautiful graphics. So we give them all of that. The things that they don’t expect are logos on the helmets and authentic striping on the jerseys, the really big rendered touchdown animations, motion captured from professional players.” A second article claims that the game would have had “More than 100 teams…new features including General Manager.”
Among all those features, there would have also been various Full Motion Video (FMV) segments for the game that included both John Madden and Pat Summerall discussing the game, as well as John discussing play formations. An issue of Cyber Sports even had behind-the-scenes images of Madden being prepped for the photo shoot.
To understand the gravity of the situation, back in the day, Madden was the game. While modern gamers now bask in the Call of Duty franchise, in the early 90’s there was just Madden. Grown men called off work, tournaments were created, and hosted, real pro players got involved at every step, and more. I was in gaming retail and the industry for almost 20 years – I still remember when Madden ’97 hit, and I had lines of people waiting to just rent the damn thing at my workplace.
So where did it all go wrong? Various resources paint a pretty depressing and desperate picture of the production. Early on, there were problems right from the start. First and foremost, the initial image of the game on the back of the system box and the first demo disc is a ‘representation’ and not actual in-game footage. The game is nowhere on the demo disc, which always confused people, and was a clear sign something was up.
Two producers had left the game early on, which didn’t help the game’s frantically short development window. Second, EA was buried deep in 16-bit software releases and playing catch up with the new 32-Bit technology. To try and lighten the burden, Madden ’96 was to be outsourced from High Score to a smaller dev team that would get it done as fast as possible. That just happened to be a team from Visual Concepts.
Yes, that Visual Concepts.
The group’s biggest problem lay in how they were approaching the assets for the game, which while ambitious, proved to be one of the game’s downfalls. An anonymous source interviewed by EGM (Electronic Gaming Monthly) over a decade later would shed light on the specific details. “They tried to render each team individually,” he explained. “Instead of rendering a player, then applying different uniform textures, they painstakingly rendered the 49ers, the Cowboys, etc.” Simply put, each player render was adding to the workload of the PlayStation’s limited RAM. This proves true in the prototype – between each play it takes at least 10 seconds for the PlayBook to come up and almost a minute between change-of-possessions. As the menus shift back to the players, whole sections of action would be missing, as they’d be in huddle, and then practically lined up with no in-between.
This was all in November of ’95, and by December the higher-ups at EA were taking notice. Rather than bury the game, they desperately hid the problems under terrible pre-builds with the promise of it being fixed and assuring people the games (including NHL ’96) were still on their way. Worse, Sony themselves supposedly had put the brakes on releasing the game due to a “Type A” Bug that required programming fixes.
Rather than try and recoup losses, EA sacked the game and dealt with the aftermath. This was far-reaching, as the entire development team from EA was dismantled and rebuilt. The new team barely had enough time to get Madden NFL ’97 together, and this proved to be a long-running issue for the franchise, as EA Sports wouldn’t see a positive nod to their game until the year 2000.
Visual Concepts, on the other hand, would end up being bought out by Sega and develop the almost legendary ‘2K” series of sports games for the Dreamcast, which took on EA Sports during the PS2 vs. Dreamcast era. Oddly enough, EA itself seems to be repeating history. Their basketball series, NBA Live, has been canceled not once, but twice, with the renamed version of NBA Elite seeing the recall before hitting retail. Meanwhile, Visual Concept’s NBA 2K series has been ruling the sales charts for years.
**Editor’s Note: The Preview build we used for this article is dated before that, so it’s assumed the interviewer either transcribed the date wrong or Mr. Rubinelli was referring strictly to the 16-bit versions. The game was due Christmas of ’95 – there’s no way it was started in November of that year.
