Another year, another Madden -- today marks the launch of EA Sports' Madden NFL 2011, the latest in over two decades of the go-to football game franchise. At EA's Tiburon studio, where the annual franchise is a constant work in progress, making each installment refreshing year after year is a deceptively complex balancing act, franchise executive producer Jeremy Strauser tells Gamasutra.
In recent years, this mandate's gotten even steeper, as the team takes on the challenge of attracting new audiences outside the deep sports sim's traditional hardcore audience -- legions of football gamers who buy the game year after year. For plenty of those players, Madden is largely the only console game they purchase. After so many years, how does the team think about new players, and is it really possible to innovate on one of the industry's longest-standing yearly franchises, especially when it's bound to the rules and realities of the sport of football?
Think you can escape politics by playing video games? Take a look back with us at the times where Presidents and candidates popped up in our gaming.
Techtorial: Amazon has updated its warehouse giving away big discounts to used games with prices starting from 22 cents going up.
When it comes to sports curses, aside from the Chicago Cubs, there’s no more active superstition than the Madden curse. Since 1999, almost every year something bad has happened to the cover athlete of Electronic Arts’ bestselling Madden NFL franchise. Cleveland Browns running back Peyton Hillis is the latest victim of this curse.
