The Best American Sports Writing 2011

by Jane Leavy

  While attending Harvard, Hawkins created his own major in game design. He programmed his first football simulation on a PDP-11 computer, a metal cabinet with flashing lights and tape-reel data storage that spanned two rooms. In 1975, he determined it would take exactly seven years for enough computers to reach homes to support a gaming business.

  Eight years later, he was right on schedule. Hawkins was Employee No. 68 at Apple Computer. They called him "junior Steve Jobs." He codified the company's unique, oft-imitated start-up culture. Made millions in stock options, then cashed out. Started Electronic Arts out of his own pocket from a home office, then moved to his first real workspace in San Mateo, California, just north of Silicon Valley. In January 1984, Time magazine named the personal computer its "Machine of the Year"; about 20 miles south in Cupertino, Apple was putting the finishing touches on a beige plastic box called Macintosh.

  Meanwhile, Hawkins had just shipped his first games, packaged in stylish boxes that looked like album jackets because that's what EA was all about: the artists and the creators. The anonymous guys coding Atari 2600 cartridges were finally getting their rock-star due. Before founding EA, Hawkins went to Los Angeles to study at the feet of record mogul Jerry Moss. What's wrong with a little Hollywood?

  Take EA's early basketball game: One-on-One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird. The real guys—sports celebrities—on the box. On the screen too. Controlled by a joystick. No one had ever done that before. Julius Erving even came to Hawkins's studio and hung out for a day. Shot hoops with Hawkins at a local YMCA. So awesome. Only he was not Hawkins's hero. Not like Montana. Montana was God. Not a god. The God. Montana played football, as Hawkins briefly did at Harvard, but better. Way better, which is kind of the point. He had already won a Super Bowl for the San Francisco 49ers. Montana-to-Clark. The Catch.

  Hawkins was about to make a football game to make up for his failed high school project and show the world everything he had learned. When his dream was ready, when it was coded and debugged and sitting on a store shelf in a stylish box that resembled the cover of, say, Def Leppard's Pyromania, it was going to need a face. A mug to move the product, for sure, but also to represent the creators.

  Montana. Gotta be Joe Cool. Seriously, who else would even be worth considering?

  Plenty of Pain Equals Plenty of Gain

  The playbook belonged to the Oakland Raiders, 1980 vintage. There were no pass plays inside, and there were hardly any plays at all. There were calls about formations, blocking schemes, and play-action. There were play names, which weren't actually names but rather alphanumeric combinations indicating pass routes or maybe a particular number telling a particular running back to hit a particular hole. Everything read like programming language—all jargon and technical gibberish.

  The playbook came from Madden. One day in the mid-1980s, it arrived at the desk of Ybarra, the EA producer tasked with turning Hawkins's vision into an actual working game.

  "I start flipping through," Ybarra said, "and I think to myself, 'These poor people—how the hell do they ever play football if they have to know all this crap?'"

  Montana was out. Already had an endorsement deal with video game console maker Atari. Also out was Cal football coach Joe Kapp, Hawkins's second choice, who wanted royalties.

  Enter Madden, who was impressed by Hawkins's pedigree and signed on.

  "If this guy went to Harvard and made up his own major in games," the former coach said, "I figured he must be a computer genius."

  Also enter 22 players on the screen, Ybarra's professional death march. The erstwhile high school chess champ became an office masochist, logging 18-hour days, helming as many as 17 games at the same time. That was doable, par for EA's start-up years. But the Madden-endorsed product was torture.

  "All my memories," Ybarra said, "are of pain."

  Some of the pain was technical: making a game on a computer, the Apple II, that didn't have enough memory, pixels, or disk storage. No sound chip either, and only one joystick port. The machine could produce four colors, sure, but only if a programmer knew all the dirty tricks. Anything beyond seven-on-seven football caused the on-screen action to slow to a crawl.

  "We were trying to model NFL football," Ybarra said, "on a computer with less horsepower than your watch."

  Some of the pain was financial. Just as EA brought its first games to market in 1983, the home video game industry imploded. In a two-year span, Coleco abandoned the business, Intellivision went from 1,200 employees to five, and Atari infamously dumped thousands of unsold game cartridges into a New Mexico landfill. Toy retailers bailed, concluding that video games were a Cabbage Patch-style fad. Even at EA—a hot home computer start-up—continued solvency was hardly assured.

  "It was like being the newest superhero on a planet that is falling apart and into the sun," former EA producer Don Daglow said. "We didn't know if our superpowers would be enough to defeat those market conditions."

  The biggest pain was conceptual: What was a football simulation supposed to look like? How should it play? "Football" on the Atari 2600 console featured three-man teams composed of players who resembled and moved like ambulatory kitchen appliances. Everything was new: play-calling boxes; an "oomph" (read: turbo) button. Ybarra tried a TV-style camera angle. Finding holes at the line of scrimmage proved impossible. He switched to the god's-eye end-zone perspective still used in today's games. The game played better, but it still looked like bleeding Lego blocks.

  During the two-day Amtrak ride with Madden, Hawkins and Ybarra quizzed the former coach from dawn to midnight, breaking down passing trees and line stunts and digesting game plans. Ybarra disembarked with blurry eyes, a splitting headache, and a legal pad full of notes.

  "We spent hours just learning blocking schemes," he said. "By the third year of the project, I could watch pro football on TV and tell you what was going to happen when the players were still lining up."

  Development dragged. A single programmer, Robin Antonick, slaved away on the code. Six months became three years. At the time, the average game took 15 months to make. More than once, Madden himself figured EA had simply given up. An anxious Hawkins flirted with having an outside developer, Bethesda Soft-works, build the game. A short-lived business deal ended in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, later settled out of court.

  "It was like Herbert Hoover," Hawkins said. "Prosperity is just around the corner."

  Around EA's offices—a jock-friendly environment, home to Nerf ball fights, weekday golf outings, and the occasional shoving match—the Madden project earned a nickname: Trip's Folly.

  "Most games that went as late as Madden and had that many struggles," Daglow said, "they'd take them out behind the barn and do the honorable thing."

  Hawkins pressed on. Madden introduced him to Frank Cooney, a football beat writer for the San Francisco Examiner. Cooney and Madden went way back, having attended Bay Area high schools just five miles apart. Although the coach was a decade older than the scribe, the two had formed a friendship during Madden's time in Oakland. At heart, both were football nerds. As a side project, Cooney regularly attended the draft combine—unheard of in those days—and supplied scouting reports on college players to NFL and USFL teams. He also designed a figurine-based board game, Grid-Grid, that functioned like electric football, only with numeric skill ratings determining the outcome of player interactions.

  "I had an idea," Cooney said, "that was waiting for the technology to catch up with it."

  In Madden, Cooney found his tech. Although the game didn't have an NFL license—San Francisco's gold-helmeted digital quarterback was named 'Joe Idaho"—it did feature players rated in 10 categories. Thanks to Cooney, Idaho's passing arm had pinpoint accuracy. And that wasn't all.

  "For our playbooks, I would say to Frank, 'Go find out what a team's five signature plays are,'" Hawkins said. "He would go up to the assistant coaches, hand them paper. And they would draw up plays! We collected a huge amount of plays that way."

  In 1988
, John Madden Football was released for the Apple II computer and became a modest commercial success. Ybarra had already left the project to make adventure games. Burned out, he didn't watch real-life pro football for an entire season. Meanwhile, a jubilant Hawkins approached Madden.

  HAWKINS: You stayed with me. EA is about to have an IPO [initial public offering]. You can have as much stock as you want.

  MADDEN: What do you mean by have?

  HAWKINS: Well, you have to buy it—at the IPO price.

  "Hell, I'm just a football coach," Madden says now. "I pointed with my finger, all knowing, and said, 'I gave you my time. I'm not giving you my money.' I showed him!"

  From 1989 to 1999, EA's share price went from $7.50 to $70. Madden laughs. "That was the dumbest thing I ever did in my life."

  Eschewing the Literal for the Hyperreal

  The stakes were high for a pair of upstart game makers, with a career-making opportunity and a $100,000 development contract on the line. In early 1990, Troy Lyndon and Mike Knox of San Diego-based Park Place Productions met with Hawkins to discuss building a Madden game for Sega's upcoming home video game console, the Genesis. Near the end of the meeting, Hawkins popped a surprise question to the duo: "Are you going to build the game I want to make or the game you want to make?"

  "My answer might have been, 'Whatever you want,'" said Lyndon, now head of Left Behind Games, a Christian video game maker. "But before I could open my mouth, Mike says, 'The game I want to make.' I was like, 'Dude, I hope that was the right answer!'"

  It was. Because the game that made Madden a phenomenon wasn't the initial Apple II release, it was the Genesis follow-up, a surprise smash spawned by an entirely different mindset. Hawkins wanted Madden to play out like the NFL. Equivalent stats. Similar play charts. Real football.

  By contrast, Lyndon and Knox previously had made a well-received Monday Night Football title featuring arcade-style, action-heavy game play. That clicked with Genesis Madden producer Rich Hilleman, whose top design priority was fun—a game with more sacks, more bombs, more tackles in the backfield, and more 60-yard runs than real-life NFL football. Something akin to an episode of The Hills, or what philosopher/author Umberto Eco dubbed the "hyperreal"—seemingly authentic, yet more entertaining than the genuine article.

  "I came to the game from making flight simulations," said Hilleman, who is now EA's chief creative officer. "If you make an F-16 fighter simulation and it's very accurate, to fire a single missile takes like 20 procedures. Only that's not people's perception of being a pilot. People's perception is Tom Cruise. Push a button and blow something up. With Genesis Madden, we wanted to emphasize what makes football exciting, not perfectly replicate the brutality of a 3.1-yard-per-carry running game."

  By 1989, EA had established itself in the home computer market, which was largely a realm of adult hobbyists and $2,000 machines. Game consoles were another story. Thanks to its wildly popular NES system—home to Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda—Japanese game maker Nintendo enjoyed a near monopoly on American living rooms, using that clout to treat companies producing NES games like feudal serfs, controlling game content, delivery, packaging, and profit distribution.

  Hawkins didn't want to play along. But he craved a piece of the $2 billion home console market. Sega, Nintendo's rival in Japan, was preparing to launch the Genesis. Industry consensus held that Nintendo's eventual NES successor would crush the Genesis the same way the NES had swamped Sega's earlier Master System. Hawkins believed otherwise. The Genesis was the future machine: great graphics, fast processor, and two joystick ports. Perfect for sports games.

  Secretly, Hawkins assembled a team to reverse-engineer the console—that is, figure out a way to make EA's games run on Sega's hardware without its technology or approval as a way to avoid licensing fees altogether. Publicly, he began negotiations with Sega, once meeting with the company's executives while the reverse-engineering project went on in a nearby room. The gambit was risky: once Sega caught wind of EA's plan, it likely would sue—in part to discourage other software companies from following EA's lead, in part because reverse-engineering without copyright infringement is technologically vexing. Hawkins's team, however, managed to pull it off.

  To help write the Genesis Madden code, Lyndon hired high school friend Jim Simmons. Formerly a sound programmer, Simmons approached Hilleman with a far-fetched idea: what if Madden had a pseudo 3-D field?

  The EA producer laughed. "Great. So how are you going to do that?"

  Simmons turned on a television set. "Kind of like this."

  The field was a breakthrough. So was replacing the clumsy Apple II passing interface—on-screen action would freeze—with a still-standard system linking each receiver to the press of a button. The game Ybarra could hardly stand became the game Hilleman couldn't put down. He took Madden home. He took it on vacation. He was hooked.

  Meanwhile, Hawkins revealed his reverse-engineering project to Sega and offered a deal. Let's team up against Nintendo. Share the glory. You can sue, but we did the tech fair and square and have great lawyers. So make us an official licensee. And give us a reduced rate. Sega normally charged an $8 to $10 fee per game cartridge. Hawkins asked for $2 per game and a $2 million cap. Negotiations stalled.

  "Only two times at EA did everyone in my management team pull me into a room and say, 'We all disagree with you,'" Hawkins said. "The first time was about not having private offices. The other time was this."

  He stuck to his guns. Ten days later, on the eve of a major consumer electronics show in Chicago, Sega relented, afraid EA would sell its reverse-engineering knowledge to other software companies and torpedo the Genesis's entire business model.

  "Over three years," Hawkins said, "that $2 million cap saved us $35 million."

  By the late summer of 1990, Genesis Madden was almost finished. Hawkins felt it would be EA's big break: right time, right market, right platform, right game. Meanwhile, Sega was in trouble. The company, like Atari before it, had signed Joe Montana as its North American spokesman but realized it wouldn't be able to complete a planned Montana game in time for the lucrative holiday retail season.

  Hawkins received a phone call from Sega's Japanese president, Hayao Nakayama. It was his turn to make an offer: Trip, you should sacrifice Madden. Give it to us to call it Joe Montana Football. This will save Christmas. We'll both be better off. Bing Gordon, EA's top marketer, urged his good friend Hawkins to make the deal.

  "I said, 'Are you crazy?'" Hawkins recalled. "This is the freaking franchise! This is the turning point. This is everything for us. Then I realized: why don't we do both?"

  What followed became one of the biggest secrets in video game history: EA built a Montana game for Sega that was designed to compete with Madden. Sort of.

  "We made sure it was totally inferior," Hawkins said.

  Working from the Madden code base, EA removed the 3-D field, slashed the pro-style playbook from 113 plays to 13, and added cartoony, big-headed player graphics.

  Joe Montana Football was a hit, but John Madden Football was an industry game-changer, spawning yearly sequels and creating a lucrative revenue model that still persists. Robust sales helped Sega pull neck and neck with Nintendo, triggering a second gaming boom—this time around, retailers concluded gaming was here to stay. In 1990, EA had a market cap of about $60 million; three years later, that number swelled to $2 billion.

  More crucially, video games were suddenly cool, the province of older teens and college kids, young men who loved competition and talking smack. Escaping the geek world, gaming set course for the center of the pop culture sun.

  "Before Madden, jocks did not play video games," Hilleman said. "Somebody playing games was more likely to get made fun of on ESPN than get featured on there."

  For Madden (the man), the new world order dawned abruptly. Six weeks after the release of the Genesis game, he arrived in New York to broadcast a Jets game. In a pregame meeting with the team, an agitated New York wide
receiver confronted the former coach.

  "Three?" the player asked. "Three, old man? You want to see what a three looks like? I'll take you out on the field and show you a three!"

  "John had no idea what the guy was talking about," Hilleman said. "We wanted John to rate the players, even gave him a chart. But we added him late to the project. He didn't get it done. So [associate producer] Michael Brook and I sat down and rated them ourselves. Right away, we get a call from John's agent. All he says is, 'John will be doing the ratings next year.'"

  Sealed with a Curse

  En route from gaming hit to pop culture juggernaut, the Madden franchise has tackled external competition—rival titles such as the NFL 2K series and Mike Ditka Power Football—and the internal division that accompanies any big-money enterprise, with various production studios winning and losing the right to make the game.

  Madden's secret weapon? A man named Sandy Sandoval. Officially, Sandoval is the director of athlete relations for EA Sports; unofficially, he's the game's answer to World Wide Wes and Winston Wolf—part fixer, part bon vivant, the guy who helped give the game its inimitable pro football cachet.

  Need an in-game ratings boost, what Madden (the man) calls "more juice"? Call Sandoval, as quarterback Byron Leftwich once did. Jonesing for an advance copy of the game? Call Sandoval, as Carson Palmer, Chad Ochocinco, and dozens of other players have done. Need to drop a few pounds, albeit digital ones? Consider it done. Last year, Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid asked Sandoval to slim down his in-game avatar, a little quid pro quo for introducing Sandoval to former Madden cover athlete Brett Favre.

  "I just saw Andy at the owners meetings," Sandoval said. "He comes up to me and is like, 'Sandy, thanks for hooking me up. I saw myself in the game. My wife loves it. She loves looking at me skinny!'"