A small, ragtag group of coders with a big idea builds something special. It’s a smash hit, bigger than their wild expectations. Competitors emerge, and the team suddenly has to scramble to keep up. But with a little hard work (and a lot of biz dev), they manage to reassert and maintain their dominance. Then, years go by, the product doesn’t seem to get any better, and you start to wonder if maybe a little competition was a good thing after all.
You can tell this story up and down Silicon Valley, across several decades and some of the most iconic products in tech history — Google Search, Facebook, the iPhone — but few hit the marks quite as cleanly as Madden. In a new four-part documentary on Prime Video, It’s in the Game: Madden NFL traces the history of one of the world’s most successful game franchises and tells it like a startup story. But by the end, Madden is very much big tech and doesn’t seem to know what to do about it.
The beats of the story are well established at this point; this isn’t even the first documentary about the rise of Madden. It all begins with Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins, who had wanted to make a football video game since he was a kid. He pursued NFL superstar Joe Montana as a partner, and when that didn’t work out, he turned to the iconic coach and commentator John Madden. Madden signed up, showed up to work, and began to relentlessly push the team to build a game that felt more like NFL football. He nixed the possibility of playing 7-on-7 instead of 11-on-11 (which EA wanted to do for graphics processing reasons), rewrote the playbook, and harped on every tiny gameplay detail. The first Madden game, released in 1988, was a mess, but the franchise took off a few years later.
Madden, who died in 2021, comes off like an almost mythical figure. There’s a very Steve Jobs-like way people talk about him: he was a visionary, obsessed with details, willing to work hard but unwilling to put up with pointless work or stupid people, occasionally prone to being a total asshole, but always in service of the work. Current and former EA executives talk about wanting to build a game that “Coach” would like, above all else.
It’s in the Game spends a lot of time on the cultural impact of the game, but the most interesting parts are the moments in which we see how Madden is actually made. The first episode tells the story of the team reverse engineering a Sega Genesis in order to make Madden run on the console without paying Sega a license. We get a behind-the-scenes look at how motion-capture technology developed to make onscreen players move more like real ones and a long and fascinating dive into how the in-game announcers worked. (Spoiler alert: it’s a lot of sitting in a studio saying “third and four,” “third and five,” “third and six” for hours on end.) We learn about the battle between the EA employees trying to fix the game’s bugs and the gamers trying to exploit them to win games. There is lots of talk, and lots of arguing, about player ratings. It’s all good tech nerdery and good fan service for anyone who loves Madden.
It’s in the Game keeps raising but never quite answering a question: what makes Madden a good game?
For all its archives and access, though, It’s in the Game keeps raising but never quite answering a question: what makes Madden a good game? It seems to be taken for granted within EA that fidelity is the only goal. The team toiled to make the football more real, then added the players and logos to make it more like the NFL, then spent years making it feel more like a TV product.
That’s what Coach wanted, it’s what Hawkins wanted, it’s what the NFL players like, but is that what fans are looking for? It doesn’t seem like it. How else can you explain why Madden NFL 2004, in which quarterback Mike Vick was so fast and so talented that he both literally and figuratively broke the game, is everyone’s favorite version of the game? Even EA employees say the Vick era was peak Madden.
Over the years, many of the best things about Madden are when the game diverts from reality. Several NFL players mention creating players with impossibly perfect stats, and having a blast with them. In its early years, the games appeared from a very different point of view than the one you might see watching a game on the couch; now, TV football has actually changed to look more like Madden. But then we flash back to 2024, and all anyone talks about is “physics-based tackling” and making tiny details more realistic.
The doc does acknowledge, mostly via social media montages, that a lot of people are unhappy with the recent state of Madden. Once again, though, EA’s answer seems to be to make everything more faithful to real life, when, in fact, fans have been begging the team for years to have new ideas about how to play football. Superstar mode, in which you become a player and go through all the ups and downs of an NFL career, has been a hit. But the game needs more. And has for a long time.
Practically overnight, Madden went from having a slew of interesting competitors to having no competition at all
So why does Madden keep winning, then? On that, It’s in the Game is actually quite clear. EA secured an exclusive license with the NFL in 2004 to use player and team information and has had it ever since. Practically overnight, Madden went from having a slew of interesting competitors, many of which were building games with better graphics and more innovative gameplay, to having no competition at all. All the drama of the series ends with that deal. From there, the story basically skips from 2005 to the present because there’s nothing left to say. Madden won. And then just kept doing Madden.
The doc ends with the release of Madden NFL 25 and frames it as a moment of victory — the franchise finding its footing again. Given that Madden 25 has a score of 70 on Metacritic and a 2.8 user score, that feels somewhat disingenuous. It was a strange year for the franchise, actually, because of the release of another EA game: after 11 years, EA Sports College Football 25 came back with a bang in 2024. It made another rehash of Madden seem even worse by comparison. “It is absolutely time for this franchise to receive a deep, substantial glow-up,” Kotaku wrote of Madden 25, “especially this year with its new neighbor College Football 25 completely eating its lunch.”
Three and a half decades since its first installment, Madden is still an unquestioned juggernaut. And it will be until the NFL allows another game to try and beat it. The last time there was competition, EA decided to make Mike Vick fun to play with, and it made Madden the most fun it ever was. A lot of gamers — and more than a few pros — would be excited to see what happens next time.
It’s in the Game is streaming now on Prime Video.
