5 Madden things you didn't know you missed ft. Cris Collinsworth

The Madden video game franchise is almost as old as video games themselves. Sure, one could point to many years before the games came around, but proportionally to how long the medium has existed, John Madden's name has been around for the vast majority of the medium's life.

Fans love to dump on franchises with complaints about similar graphics and gameplay to past iterations. But it only takes the act of dusting off a retro console and popping in a game to realize just how much the series has actually changed.

Sure, the last few years have seen fewer changes and upgrades than fans want, but if one looks back further, the differences are shocking.

Will Madden 24 feature a new commentary duo?

Here's a look at five things that have changed over the years since the early 2000s:

---

#1 - Intros and game intros

Today, modern Madden games feature a live-action intro on the start screen, combining music and action to hype the player up to play the game. However, in the games of the early 2010s, the hype videos would play before the start screen. For instance, in a game released near the end of the Xbox 360 era, Ray Lewis is seen giving a dramatic pep-talk to the camera.

Also, the presentation before each game in Madden 25 greeted the player with a live-action hype video of each team with an epic background beat.

In the early 2000s, the games featured a unique player or person from the league saying the company motto every time the player turned on the game. No other AAA series has done anything similar since.

---

#2 - Poor audibles and play art

Today, gamers take the clear and clean UI for granted. In the early 2000s, it was very difficult to understand what was going to happen in each called play. When calling audibles in the early 2000s, it was also impossible to know what the play was going to be changed to at the line of scrimmage.

Put simply, one would have to memorize what each button combination created for each audible, leaving critical situations a complete guessing game.

---

#3 - X to sprint

For the last decade-plus, the right trigger was how to get the player up to full speed. However, in the older games of the early 2000s, the X button or A button was the sprint button. The shock of going from the trigger to the face button is jarring in 2023, to say the least.

---

#4 - Animations laughably cookie cutter

If the UI didn't get any style points, the animations of most games before Madden 17 and especially before 2013 are outright trainwrecks. The players would robotically glide across the ground and suddenly accelerate and decelerate at the drop of a hat.

While it takes some getting used to, the animations while running the ball make it almost impossible to control the action in a meaningful way.

---

#5 - Patchwork Madden commentary feat. Cris Collinsworth

While it has been seven consecutive games with the same commentators, asking to go back to the old commentators is equivalent to wanting to go back to the phonograph.

The Jim Nantz and Phil Simms era of the late Xbox 360/PS3 and early Xbox One/PS4 days are serviceable, but come off as a little clunky. Everything before that, however, is like nails on a chalkboard. Of course, hearing the voice of the late great John Madden is great, but the systems in charge of delivering the dialog are laughable in 2023.

Before Jim Nantz and Phil Simms, commentary sounded like someone just cut words from different contexts and taped them together to make a ransom note. That said, fans of Al Michaels, Cris Collinsworth, Gus Johnson, and John Madden might be shocked to learn that all four commentators voiced lines in at least one game from the Xbox 360 and PS2 eras.