30 Years Ago NFL GameDay Launched and Knocked Madden Off Its Throne

You might not know anything about the early days of the PS1, but long before NFL 2K5 there was a game that actually did outsell Madden: NFL GameDay. In fact, NFL GameDay is the game that pushed Madden the closest to its breaking point.

30 years is an eternity in the video game world, but if we go back in time, the PS1 launched in the US in September 1995. In December of that year, NFL GameDay showed up on PlayStation — and Madden 96 did not.

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Madden 96 did launch on 16-bit consoles in November 1995, but the 32-bit era belonged to NFL GameDay during that first holiday season. NFL GameDay was the best-selling game on the PlayStation until Resident Evil arrived (as you can see in the magazine clipping below from Next Generation), and Madden ultimately decided to cancel its PS1 version since the game was a hot mess and would not be ready in time for the holidays.

There’s plenty of juicy nuggets from 1995 that tell the story of what the hell happened with both Madden and GameDay that year, and I want to go over some of the drama as a matter of history. This will include old magazine clippings (I friggin’ love going through old magazines), old TV commercials, and clips from interviews both EA and Sony have given about this time period.

The other thing I’m going to be doing in this newsletter is playing both Madden 96 on the SNES (no longer inferior to the Genesis version by this time), and NFL GameDay on the PS1 — and showing off gameplay from both just to see how they feel (and how they look).

I have the real hardware and real software for NFL GameDay, and while I will be playing Madden 96 on an emulator for this piece, I do plan to get the rest of my retro consoles in order now that I do have a quality upscaler and setup to record retro games.

So let’s jump into things, talk about these games, and discuss why 1995 was the start of the Football Wars that would carry on through NFL 2K5.

Setting The Stage

I do think some of us take for granted how “calm” the video game space is these days, for better or worse. While 30 years is still an eternity in video games, the market itself is relatively predictable these days. But if you go back to any era from around the NES all the way up through the first HD era, there was a lot of mess at almost all times.

The technology was rapidly changing, consoles did not stick around as long, and you had more companies jumping in and out of the marketplace both in terms of hardware and software. This meant there was a lot of competition, a lot of choices, but also a lot of trash that you had to wade through in order to find the good stuff.

If you were playing games in that era, you probably remember a lot of terrible sports games. I rented more than my fair share of garbage in the late ‘90s when I was finally old enough to really be playing games, and I think it’s sometimes overlooked why EA became so dominant.

Yes, EA had the licensing and all that, but a lot of games would get similar licensing over the years. The bigger thing was that EA made solid games almost every year, no matter the sport.

You could not say the same about most other companies that were pumping out sports games (what’s up Emmitt Smith Football to name just one piece of garbage from that time).

From Madden 93-95, you pretty much knew you’d get a solid game, and Madden 95 sticks out in my (very) early childhood as a game I’d watch my brother play a lot.

But what is still mostly true today was even more true back then, and it’s that technology drove video games, and especially sports video games.

This obsession with technology and the power struggle between hardware and software companies is what drove Trip Hawkins, the founder of EA, to leave EA and start 3DO. This move by Hawkins also played a part in the creation of the PlayStation and the fracturing of the Madden development teams.

That clip from the four-part Madden NFL documentary on Amazon is a glimpse at what was happening back at that time within EA. What you also need to understand about that time period is that multiple development teams worked on EA’s sports games. This means the Genesis and Super Nintendo had different development teams at the time.

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