Madden 06: 20 Years Since the Most Consequential Sports Game of All-Time Came to Xbox 360

You know I don’t like to post clickbait headlines so, yes, I do actually believe Madden 06 (for better or worse) is the most consequential/important/significant/insert any other weighty adjective here sports video game ever released.

What it meant to Tiburon, EA, sports games, football games, and the video game industry is still felt today. And, in truth, it’s not even that surprising that’s the case because people knew as soon as the NFL and EA inked that exclusive contract that things had changed.

The uproar was real right after the exclusivity deal was finalized. NFL 2K was found dead at the scene (and remains dead 21 years later, sorry), and even people who didn’t really talk about sports games were ready to declare EA one of the true “evils” of the video game world.

So right as social media took hold, high-definition TVs started to arrive in more and more households, and Xbox began its one dominant era with the Xbox 360, Madden 06 was there for all of it on day one.

For those who want to read any premium newsletters, you can do so with the free trial, no matter whether you have done the 30-day free trial in the past or not. I will be dedicating the whole month of November to the Xbox 360 sports game launch lineup, so if you’re into that, subscribe now.

If you want to hang with your fellow OSers, here’s your weekly reminder to also join the OS Discord if you want to chat with me or others from the community. If you sign-up for the premium newsletter, send a direct message to either Rob S (thekernelpop) or ChaseB (chucklesbiscotti) on Discord, and either one of us will add you to the extra Supporters area on Discord, and we have a snazzy role and badge to give you on there, too.

We also now have an official OS app! You can download it now on Google Play and iOS.

And if you somehow don’t know how Madden 06 became the only game in town, it’s easy enough to explain. As shown in the It’s in the Game: Madden NFL documentary on Amazon, Madden was feeling itself (rightfully so) back in 2004.

Whether or not Madden was better than NFL 2K from a “critics” standpoint at that point in 2004 was not relevant. The point is Madden’s sales were immense in comparison to 2K’s, so 2K decided to make NFL 2K5 and release it for $20.

Well, that move ended up backfiring:

So Madden inked the exclusive contract (one it continues to renew to this day), and after a highly successful Madden 06 launch on PS2/Xbox, EA pushed forward with its Xbox 360 release in November 2005.

Admittedly, I was not there on day one of the Xbox 360 when it launched in the US in November 2005. I was in high school and had pre-ordered an Xbox 360 from GameStop, but I was not among the lucky few who made the cut with those initial shipments (I still remember an employee at my local GameStop calling me up and saying they only got like six consoles on day one).

However, I did get mine shortly after Thanksgiving, and I also remember the GameStop employee imploring me to be careful as I left my local mall because he was genuinely worried about me getting jumped for the console (he wrapped up the 360 in a nondescript bag — fear not, I made it home without incident).

Was Madden 06 on the Xbox 360 among my purchases on that day? No. But unlike with my PS1 where I had no choice but to skip Madden (since it got cancelled), I had a choice this time around.

I may have been there on day one as a young one when we got a PS2 for Christmas — Eddie George and Madden 2001 were the biggest part of my Christmas that year — Donovan McNabb and Madden 06 would not be part of the holiday cheer this time around.

By the time of the official launch of the Xbox 360, I was already a member of OS, and the word was already out on the forums that Madden 06 on the Xbox 360 was mostly junk. I took that to heart.

Instead, I came home with Project Gotham Racing 3, Condemned: Criminal Origins, NHL 2K6, NBA 2K6, Call of Duty 2 — and then ended up playing Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved for hours on end rather than playing any of those games…

In fact, the first time I ever played Madden 06 was while writing this feature. And, yep, those OSers were right, the game stinks.

But why does it stink? Why did it go so bad? Why is this game still so important today? Well, luckily it’s one of the few games that has plenty of retrospectives on it, and you’re also talking to someone who lived through a console launch while working at Tiburon as EA went from the PS3/Xbox 360 era to PS4/Xbox One.

So come with me as I take you through why Madden 06 on the Xbox 360 was so consequential. We’ll be going through old magazine clippings, words from the developers who were there at the time, clips from the game itself, and I’ll also explain what was happening in the industry at the time.

Oh, and I’ll even heap some praise on Madden 06 on the PS2/Xbox as well because I also played that for this feature.

Everything Went Wrong From The Start

Let’s wind the clock back to what most people remember as the first big mistake, which is the bait and switch E3 teaser from E3 2005.

E3 2005 was the beginning of the golden era of companies lying through their teeth with all this pre-rendered footage. And even if we had doubts about what we were seeing at the time, a lot of us were still unfamiliar with pre-rendered footage because a lot of us were still getting used to having this much access to marketing materials.

The rise of faster internet speeds and the mystery of “high-def” itself were still fresh ideas for a lot of us, so we got to watch a lot more of E3 than we ever had before, and we still didn’t quite understand what the “power” of the HD-era really meant yet.

A very good Rolling Stone feature (that’s barely available in any form now) has a good explanation of how this fake trailer came together:

In reality, leading up to that E3 folks at EA slaved over a shoddy tech demo featuring Shaun Alexander running through an empty stadium — and this was after their kicking demo (that they also slaved over) had already been rejected by execs. None of that work was ever shown at E3, and instead EA chose to put the Tiburon dev team in a terrible spot by showing off the target footage.

However, I will say, the actual trailer that plays at the start of the game isn’t that far off from the pre-rendered E3 video:

It’s still not truly representative of what’s to come, but it’s at least using real assets. This would become somewhat normal as well in the era ahead. For example, the infamous Killzone 2 trailer ended up being somewhat “true” even if it started as a pre-rendered lie as well.

But even if execs at EA put the development team in a terrible spot with that phony video, Tiburon was already in deep shit long before that fateful moment. They royally messed up during the planning stages for the Xbox 360 version of their game, and they simply didn’t realize how out of scope they would be:

Just look how pissed Madden looks (and that is not a dude you want to make angry).

Poor pre-production planning was just part of the issue. Tiburon itself also ballooned during this time period with new employees. Tiburon was making more than just Madden (Superman Returns was its biggest “side project” in the cooker — an awful game as well, for the record, though the flying was kind of good at times) — and what was once a “tiny” team of 70-100 people was now up to 600+ people.

Teams Change, Priorities Change

And that influx of new employees shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s easy to sell 70-100 people who grew up playing Madden or loving the NFL to essentially kill themselves by working 100+ hours a week and sleeping under their desks. It’s much harder to sell 600+ people on this, especially when they’re not even massive football fans.

And, to be clear, no one should be working those insane hours in the first place, but the point is that amount of people are not going to stomach it to the same degree either. Plus, EA had already dealt with a PR nightmare from an EA spouse talking about the terrible working conditions in the not-so-distant past:

Either way, the new people wanting to do something akin to NFL Films — abandoning TV-style presentation for something more “cinematic” — is a “sin” of the past we still deal with today in some forms. “Bulky shoulder pads” being a priority for Madden 06, I mean who ever talks about that still being a problem today?

Oh, and that animation system everyone ended up not liking in Madden 06, yeah, it came from this era as well:

In essence, this was a perfect storm of bad decisions coming together through supercharged growth as EA completed its full purchase of DICE (the company that created Frostbite) by October 2006.

It all truly began here.

Beyond the influx of new people and mergers, as someone who went through a new console launch at Tiburon, an issue I became familiar with while working on the PS4/Xbox One launch was even worse during the 360 era, which was a lack of development kits for the team (which are what developers use to “make” the game).

On top of that, Tiburon didn’t know the final specs of the 360 until very late, and the “red ring of death” was a problem with the dev kits well before consumers had to deal with it at home. Dev kits meeting their end is a problem to some degree with every new console, but it was certainly at its worst during the lead-up to the Xbox 360 (and then again with the PS3).

What made this even more miserable for the dev team was that everyone at Tiburon knew Madden 06 was bad and was going to be bad.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we (see: game developers) generally always know when something is bad — or at least know when we won’t have enough time to make it not suck. We have enough taste to realize when we’re making a dud, and sometimes you just can’t avoid it no matter how hard you try. Video game development is cruel in that way.

Why Was Madden 06 On The 360 So Bad?

Looking back at a lot of the reviews and magazine clippings from the time, I honestly think Madden 06 got off pretty easy. For as dumb as Marc Bulger might look in those bulky pads, a lot of people seemed to be able to stomach everything that was lost in the transition from PS2 to Xbox 360 because the game was prettier now. High-definition graphics were damn cool and an easy thing to sell.

The paper of record (see: the OS review from one of the GOATs, Shawn Drotar) was not as forgiving as most of the others out there, but you can see even in Shawn’s review he’s willing to let certain things slide to some degree all while pointing out everything that was stripped away:

Starting “from scratch” was a choice EA made across the board this year with its sports games as it went to a new generation of consoles, and it did not pay off in any of them. EA would never do this sort of thing again with the launch of a new console, and you can point to this debacle as the reason why — though they certainly would still remove features at the start of new generations down the line.

Having played this game for the first time ever during these last couple weeks, I can now say with some authority that there’s not much truly redeeming about the 360 version when compared against its PS2/Xbox brother, except for the menus.

The UI does slap.

I think the early versions of the “blades” UI on the Xbox 360 remain my favorite dashboard experience on any console ever made, and Madden did seem to lean into that “blades” idea. The ‘06 menus are snappy, responsive, and there really is a ton of player info you can get after. Of course, it’s just a shame franchise mode is so bare that you don’t navigate nearly as many menus as usual.

But besides the menus (and that includes the new playcalling screen) it’s downhill from there. It is not a fun game to play, especially after coming from Madden 06 on the PS2, which I replayed way more than I needed to for this feature.

Madden 06 on the PS2/Xbox holds up as a fun game to this day, and I think in Clay Shaver’s OS review (another one of the GOATs) he correctly calls out that ‘06 really is the first time in years Madden does try to do some “sim” stuff.

QB Vision Cone Has Entered The Chat

The funniest part about the Vision Cone is not that it only existed for a couple months before it was mostly shelved in another version of Madden with the same year on it, it’s that Tiburon did include it in Madden 06 on the Xbox 360 at all.

So many gameplay features were taken out of the 360 version of the game, yet Vision Cone remained even though EA was clearly already backpedaling. In the 360 version, the Vision Cone has to be manually triggered and it’s mostly irrelevant even if you use it.

They didn’t “kill it” like so many other gameplay features that were liked and had universal appeal, they just nerfed the Vision Cone into the ground to a degree that it must have been confusing when you noticed the AI QB bringing up a random cone on a passing play here and there — there was no explainer about the Vision Cone (it’s not even mentioned by name anywhere in the settings) on the 360, so any new players must have been absolutely baffled by it.

Some people thought the Vision Cone was cumbersome, but I can tell you we are missing something like the Vision Cone even today. You are speaking to a Vision Cone truther.

It was fun to try once again while playing QB in Madden 06 on the PS2, and it added a layer to playing linebacker on defense that I didn’t realize I missed so much.

Why Are You Making Every Mistake Possible?

Presentation was something that got some love in reviews of the 360 version, but I call foul on that as well. Here is the pregame intro every game — no matter what.

And then here is almost every pre-snap look after calling a play:

I can see what they’re going for — they want to show off the faces with these zoomed-in views. And a lot of the faces do look good. They definitely captured over 150+ faces for the Xbox 360 version, and most of them certainly looked impressive for the time.

Nevertheless, what are you thinking having that camera be the default at the LOS? I can’t see anything except the running back’s ass. You have to press right trigger to zoom the camera out, and you also need to press “A” every time to skip that QB walk-up animation — your play clock does go down while watching that cutscene play out, so you can very easily get delay of game penalties if you’re not careful.

The presentation is really just a checklist of gimmicks that mostly add nothing. EA would eventually use QB cadences in much better ways, but in this version they’re just annoying:

Yes, it’s cool you have Drew’s voice, now I never want to hear it again.

Meanwhile, I don’t need to remind you, but we had a radio show on the PS2 version of the game that still hasn’t been fully replicated (and it honestly wasn’t even that amazing!)

The NFL Films ideas are not fully fleshed out, but going back to that idea of being “cinematic” you can see the guts of concepts at times — beyond the terrible idea of bulky shoulder pads.

Most of you are probably aware of the radio announcer being there over real commentary. EA planned to have a unique radio announcer for every team but then stripped it down to just the one (how did they not realize right away having 32 radio announcers was going to be too much work?)

You can hear NFL Films music at times, but it’s mostly just in the replay screen:

And, oh yeah, they got Ed Hochuli and his large muscles into the game. Of course, there’s next to no penalties called (again, I know you’re shocked to hear that), and even if you do get them, a lot of the times they’re because of bugs (but let the record show I did get a facemask penalty on the first play of my first game ever of Madden 06 on the 360 — it was also the only penalty called that game).

It’s Just So Boring

More than anything else, Madden 06 on the 360 is just not fun to play. The players look bulky and feel bulky in motion. Even someone like Vick — who is extremely busted once again in this version because the defense doesn’t know how to react to him (this is not nearly as big an issue in the PS2 game) — isn’t that fun to use because look how slow this all looks:

And, yes, appreciate the crappiness of the field goal meter — a meter that is quite good on the PS2 version as they just use a version of the Tiger Woods meter more or less in that game.

The field goal meter itself also shows the lack of polish all over the place.

The gameplay bugs are everywhere as well. Here’s two plays that happened within a minute of each other:

The first is a bug that causes the CPU defenders to get an encroachment penalty as they stack the box and then run into each other before nudging themselves into my offensive line. The second is I think a botched screen pass that is an absolute calamity by the CPU.

But honestly, worst of all is that the 360 version is just boring and easy. All-Pro on the PS2 version vs. the Xbox 360 version is wild. It’s like playing on Rookie mode on the 360 while the PS2 provides some decent challenge and much more varied gameplay on All-Pro.

For one thing, the middle of the field is essentially always open on the 360, and you don’t need an iota of strategy since your pass blocking usually holds up for so long on the 360. Beyond that, I already showcased how most QBs can just scramble at will.

I would say the running game is mediocre in all versions of Madden 06, but in every other way the gameplay is superior on the PS2.

Actually, you know what, I take that back. The 360 version also defaults to having turbo on the right trigger rather than a face button — good call there.

Madden 06 Was A ‘Changing Of The Guard’ Moment

You could say lots of good lessons were learned by EA from this launch, and to an extent they were. Still, Madden has never “truly” recovered with some fans, and that distrust all started with that infamous exclusivity deal and then Madden 06 on the Xbox 360.

But perhaps the worst thing that happened around this game was that Tiburon as a studio lost its soul. Whatever magic that they found with Madden 04, Madden 05, and NFL Street 2 did start to wane with the launch of the Xbox 360. And some of that was probably always unavoidable. Making HD games takes more people, and so the studio had to grow by default.

On top of that, it’s absolutely true the studio should be proud they were able to ship anything at all considering all the missteps they had leading up to launch. It could have easily been an ET-buried-in-a-landfill situation, and instead it was just your usual below average sports game.

But it is clear that grind was the last straw for some.

And I think that’s a prevailing story for a lot of the start of the HD era. Teams blew up in size — and continued to blow up in size — and studios like Tiburon that were filled with people willing to give up sleep and sanity in their earlier days were no longer willing to do that once the quality of the product was no longer matching up to the man hours that were going into it.

It’s one thing to say you worked 100 hours a week for months to make Madden 04 and Madden 05. It’s another thing to say you worked for 100 hours a week for months to create Madden 06 on the Xbox 360.

It’s one thing to be working on the game you love with 30-40 people who become almost like family because you’re around each other every single day working towards a common unified goal. It’s another thing to have to report to three managers and get deliverables from someone you barely know who was making Disney movies six months prior.

Again, it’s not a value judgment about what work is worth or not worth, but when you choose to “start from scratch” like EA did, it’s a gamble. EA rolled the dice and lost that year, and some would say they continue to lose today in part because of decisions that were made all the way back in 2005.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase