The most impressive thing about him is he is a football legend to different generations based on his work in three separate disciplines. People born in the 1950s or earlier remember him as a Hall of Fame coach. People born before the 1990s remember him as the country's most beloved sports broadcaster. People born in the 1990s or later remember him as the guy behind video game football. It is hard to think of anyone else who had a similarly large impact in one field in three such distinct ways.
Right on. I remember him strictly as an announcer. He rarely had anything super important or overly technical to say, but we loved listening to him nonetheless, probably for that reason...like a football grandpa. Reminds me a lot of Harry Caray, and I'll forever miss listening to both.
I’ve always wondered if Madden’s legacy as an announcer was tarnished a bit by the video games. It was magical having him dynamically announce the game you are playing, but the sophistication was limited, especially in XBox/PS2 era. I remember his voice saying generic silly things about the games I played as much as I remember the real games he announced.
IRRC, he also said he focused on explaining the game to someone who wasn’t a fan yet. It sometimes drove lifetime enthusiasts nuts, but I appreciated that he saw his role as making a complex game accessible.
See, I don't think the video games hurt much as much as tried to represent the real him. I could see that idea that he only wanted to explain to nonfans. His announcing was always very basic and nontechnical, to the point of being overly obvious. But I appreciate him no less for that - he was addicting to listen to, and that's what matters most IMO.
Hall of Fame coach with the #1 highest winning percentage in league history, rarely had anything important to say. Unbelievable. You'd probably come out of a personal lecture by Albert Einstein saying, all he talked about was that ancient E = mc2 stuff that we covered way back in high school.
Dude, nothing I said was "hateful." If you choose to publicly insult successful, highly-regarded, widely-loved people, don't be surprised when others point out that you sound stupid and are likely in the wrong.
No idea what gives you that impression. Why would I be defending a random person I simply read a Wikipedia article about? Of course I heard him broadcast football games. Hundreds of times, from the mid-80's on. I have a pile of videotapes of games he did with Pat Summerall (who was also amazing in the booth). I was lucky enough to have a personal conversation with him once.
He increased my knowledge and understanding of football immensely, and I'm certainly not alone. His contemporary broadcasters, like Cosell & Meredith, had no idea how to break down a nickel defense or the ability to point out the key block that opened a hole for Walter Payton or gave Troy Aikman an extra second in the pocket to find a receiver deep. John Madden did that consistently for two decades, with a passion and exuberance that was unmatched. He was able to clearly explain why Lawrence Taylor and Reggie White were so effective at causing chaos defensively -- but also, in the rare cases when they were neutralized, how o-lineman did so and what blocking schemes were frustrating them. He brought attention to players, especially lineman, who were generally ignored, and explained the concepts of blitzing and stunting and pulling and various defensive fronts to the masses, both why they worked and also how opposing coaches strategized around them.
If you weren't able to absorb any of his concepts and wisdom, if it wasn't "important" to you, well, that's your problem, but publicly posting so doesn't take away from Madden's greatness.
Madden was the butt of many jokes for his “duh” comments but the older i get, the more sense they seem to make.
I’m reminded of the “software is just ifs and loops” post from weeks back. I had that opinion when I started, lost it for 15 years and find it returning more and more.
One day in the late 90s or early 2000s a friend and I were playing Madden. My dad walked into the room and announced “huh, why are they playing football on a Friday.” He hadn’t noticed at a casual glance that it was a video game- John Madden’s voice was coming out of the TV and it looked like football, so it must be football. That has always stuck with me as an impressive level of immersion.
Sports video games, and Madden in particular, helped mainstream gaming and computing in a very real way. I hope EA brings him back to the cover one last time next year.
Legend. Don't think I'd love football nearly as much as I do if he wasn't around calling games when I was a kid. He had an infectious love for the game. The game lost a lot of its appeal when he stopped broadcasting.
I ran into John Madden a few years ago at A.G. Ferrari in Soma (he had a residence nearby at the St Regis). He cut in line in front of me, to get his seemingly daily sandwich. The lady behind the counter and I let it slide.
I'm glad I didn't quote the game (or worse, say "boom, tough actin tinactin"), but it was definitely interesting to have thought "Huh, what a wild life. Now he's just an old man who wants a sandwich like anyone else".
Even when you are wealthy or famous at the peak of whatever fame or wealth you may have, or at the end of it, some times you just want to be left alone and have a sandwich.
Likely zero. "boulos" was probably tapping away at something on his phone or listening to headphones and didn't respond when the employee at the deli counter yelled "Next." Or maybe, it was as simple as an 80-something year-old guy not feeling comfortable leaving his 80-something year-old wife at home alone for long.
Whatever happened, boulous is still so bitter about it that he felt it necessary to post this story on the day the man died. Says a lot more about him than about John Madden.
I'm not sure how you read 'bitter' into his story.
Seems like OP just had a moment of realisation that the cultural elites have similar desires to the common folk and wanted to relay that minor connection to the man
If that's what he wanted to get across, he could have just stated that both he and John Madden were both on line to get a sandwich somewhere. That actually would have been somewhat endearing. There's absolutely no reason to bring up the part about cutting in line -- let alone making that the focus of the story -- unless he wanted to portray John Madden as some kind of jerk (which, as all of today's tributes have demonstrated, is the polar opposite of what he actually was).
Yes, a person who feels that's necessary to do, on the day the man died, is mighty bitter about something.
I have no idea if this applies to Mr Madden, but sometimes when you become wealthy, you expect people to cater to you and the little people don't matter. "Cutting" line to get to the front wouldn't even seem as a faux pas to them. They just expect to be served with priority.
Occasionally I do dumb shit that probably comes off as a jerk move, but it is unintentional ... and I am neither wealthy nor old enough to claim dementia. I try to cut people slack, and even famous people can't be Mr. Nice Guy 100% of every day, even if it seems like that should be their personality.
Madden definitely had a hulking, physical presence about him. I had grown up listening to his broadcasts with Pat Summerall and played Madden on various systems. Fast forward about 10+ years and I had moved to San Francisco and frequented The Grove near Yerba Beuna. I am terrible at recognizing celebrities in real life, but I immediately recognized him when he walked in. I had already ordered so I didn't notice if he cut anyone in line... one of the few times I can remember being starstruck.
I cannot just let your story sit here unchallenged on the day this great man died. First of all, John Madden lived his whole life as just a simple guy who wants a sandwich. He was as blue-collar as they come. The clothes he wore. Took a bus (sure, his own bus, but still) everywhere.
More importantly, perhaps he cut a line, I wasn't there and don't know. But literally everybody he worked with, who interacted with him for years or decades, insists he was gracious, generous, and kind. It's not right to mention your single interaction without countering with the thousands of people who loved this man.
One more anecdote. In 1978, during a preseason game, Jack Tatum of Madden's Raiders put a hit on New England's Darryl Stingley that paralyzed him for life. Madden, not New England's coach, and not Tatum, visited Stingley in the hospital that night. And the next day. And the day after that. And regularly, for weeks and months. He opened his house to Stingley and his wife. He returned from away games and immediately drove up to check on Stingley. He had no obligation, no responsibility, he just thought it was important to do.
I was looking at Madden NFL 200x games last week specifically the assortment of music (Chamillionaire, Earshot, Slipknot, Green day, etc.) that got me into listening to music in the first place. If it wasn't for those games, I don't think I would have ever gotten into football or listening to music.
Modden NFL helped demonstrate technology really well in a variety of ways that was fun and interesting to people who didn't see the appeal in video games like Pac Man. It was definitely a big contributor to getting more people into electronic interactive content.
Truly a loss to the game of football. I will forever remember his voice while commentating as well as him drawing on screen in a silly fashion, to explain different plays.
Great 30 for 30 podcast episode, where they feature a few stories /from/ Madden himself about what it was like creating the first John Madden video game and how his early influence helped make it what it became.
> Madden's Game: we look back at how John Madden went from being a football player and coach to the conscience of a billion dollar video game franchise that has stayed true to the sport itself.
Looks like he may have been responsible for at least inspiring the digital first down line that's just part of the broadcast now. It's not all football stuff, though.
Hard to know who famous people really are, but he seemed to be a pretty good dude.
One thing I remember that I rarely read about is him being involved with marketing for Florsheim shoes. My dad had extra wide feet and for whatever reason the Florsheim dress shoes were the ones he liked to wear for work. On a couple of occasions as a kid I got dragged along with him to the Florsheim store in the mall so he could get shoes. I think this was in the mid-to-late 80s. They had what was basically a video game cabinet, except it was like a guided sales catalog or shoe picker, and it was narrated by John Madden. At least it was something I could mess with instead of sitting around looking at shoes.
EA will keep his name and they'll continue to make a boatload of money with each yearly release while making the minimum amount of fan-requested changes with the least effort possible.
The game is actually regressing. Just bought Madden after 3 years and the initial load time is somehow longer. Game sometimes stutters when running plays. Don't get me started on MUT being pushed everywhere. At this point, I wish they'd give me Madden 07 with better graphics.
They are doing the same thing with Fifa, pushing FUT and hoping kids gamble on packs. Gaming isn't about genuine good fun now, it is too focused on milking Mom and Dads wallets. I took a few years off Fifa because it was heading that direction and I knew it was time to retire. Caved in and purchased Fifa 22 last week after a 3 year sabbatical.
My wife: "How's the new game?!?"
Me: "Feels like 2019, I'm not sure what I bought."
I'm officially done with yearly sports releases and I guess that's ok to them because I'm clearly not their target demographic anymore.
> I'm clearly not their target demographic anymore.
Every year a new crop of kids come of age for the parents to be willing to buy them a game. For the rest, it's a status symbol just like the annual purchase of a new phone. Gotta have the latest player rankings! Like purchasing skins/wardrobe/stickers for in-game use. A whole generation of people that will probably be just fine paying Toyota a monthly fee to use their key FOBs.
They'll probably use his twitter account to shill NFTs sometime in the next year.
EDIT: for the downvoters: I was referring to Stan Lee's twitter account now being used to shill NFTs, and saw John Madden as the next logical target of that behavior. Said it tongue in cheek. I'll keep my jokes to myself from now on.
Having retired over a decade ago, I bet a fair number of Madden players already have no idea who John Madden is and may think it's an obscure term like gridiron.
Rest in peace, you turducken lover. There's a place on the West Bank in New Orleans that made them for him special order and sent them to him on game days.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I would say the demographic of HN, being a plurality of American males, grew up watching football called by Madden or played videos games with his name on it.
There's a reason intellectual gratification is the bar and the goal for topicality, not emotional catharsis or pop-cultural notoriety. If simply being popular with American males became the standard, this place would degenerate into Reddit.
I think the occasional discussion of a notable person's death is an exception to the rule.
I think this would be a less controversial opinion if the deceased were a well known artist, but because Madden "only" is an icon to three generations of people by shaping the game of football and sports video games, it's too pedestrian.
I would argue John Madden is an important figure in tech history by endorsing one of the most popular video game franchises in the world, and moreover, one that brought video gaming into the mainstream.
It was one of the biggest things that put EA on the map in the 90s, and for better or worse EA is one of the most important companies in the game industry.
More specifically it was the lift off point for the entire EA Sports division which is notorious for its 2 decade aggressiveness in pursuing video game sports licensing.
no, it’s because he’s a white guy and kobe was not. note that it doesn’t require explicit racism, just implicit bias, to create such disparities (though it would be statistically unlikely that no explicit racists contributed to this state of affairs).
I'm a Black guy and very much of the activist mindset, but that's just not a reasonable comparison. The first John Madden Football came out in 1988, when Kobe was 10 years old.
Jordan vs. Bird came out that same year, which was a cool game. Michael Jordan had all the opportunity to be a better franchise maker, but AFAIK, the next effort he lent his name to was Chaos In The Windy City, and it simply wasn't a very good game, let alone a franchise. Jordan (and Shaq) were conspicuously absent from most NBA products, having negotiated video game rights prior to the NBA negotiating collectively. This is all from memory, so I may not be 100% on this.
I don't know if John Madden did anything particularly special or if he just got a bit lucky, but my point is he is embedded in tech history.
i wasn't denying that madden had a tech tie-in via a video game endorsement deal, but rather, noting that implicit racism plays a role in his memorialization being arbitrarily 'on-topic' and upvoted here as opposed to kobe, whose memorial posts were viciously suppressed. kobe had a tech investment fund in LA and was developing his own media/tech company, so he's arguably more connected to the tech industry despite he's notoriety largely coming from playing basketball.
madden indeed got lucky, as he didn't do much more than hawk his name & voice to EA. he wasn't personally developing or marketing the games, so his tie to tech is pretty tenuous.
My bad. It was a rhetorical question. I don't find anything intellectually interesting about madden though and I suppose that's why I got a little snippy.
Supposedly "Hacker News" is intellectually interesting news for "Hackers". I'm not convinced this is.
edit: I see am I getting a ton of downvotes, I suppose there's a lot of american football fans on "Hacker News".
As covered elsewhere, John Madden’s partnership with EA created one of the most important (and profitable) video game franchises in history. He was/is literally the face of the “sports video game.” That’s relevant to this forum.
As for sports, while you can not find it interesting personally it’s clear it is interesting to a huge number of people. The consequences and study of that should be interesting in and of itself.
On the issue of obituaries, etc. on HN, I think it's helpful for us to remember that we are reaching that point when the people of our collective childhoods, the pioneers of technology, media, entertainment, etc. will start to die off. I didn't realize Madden was that old, what a great guy he was.
