Madden 2001 had a lot of gameplay upgrades, but we still didn’t have things like the Hit Stick quite yet. Madden 2001 had a franchise mode but did not yet have a create-a-team feature. In a lot of ways, Madden 2001 summed up launch games by being more about the graphics than the gameplay and depth. But it was amazing to see back in 2000 because we had never seen such high fidelity in our living rooms. In retrospect, is it sort of funny hearing Herman Moore say “I look good out here” while beating his chest? Yes. That being said, Madden 2001 was more a sign of things to come for the franchise rather than the pinnacle of the series - Madden 2004/2005 would be the culmination of that promise - but it all started here with the initial wow factor. It was a lot to take in, and even if you had played NFL 2K the year prior, this was still a big step up even from the Dreamcast in the graphics department. The polygons man, the sheer amount of polygons. For me, it carried the PS2 launch (along with SSX) and made me forget that I also owned Kessen at the time - let’s never speak of that again.įirst and foremost, the graphical leap here was just insane. These peripheral factors are what make Madden 2001 on the PS2 even more impressive.
There was just about nothing worth playing at launch, even if the console itself was nearly impossible to find because the hype was out of this world. It is still considered one of the worst launches in history for games. On top of that, the PS2 launch was rough. When the Dreamcast launched and NFL 2K was the Madden replacement after EA decided not to develop for that console, this put even more pressure on that PS2 launch for the Madden series. NFL GameDay was there giving it competition, and other series like NFL Quarterback Club were also eating into the market. The PS1/N64 era was not a bad era for Madden, but it was not the golden age for the series either.
Why I feel that way goes back to first remembering what Madden represented at the time of the PS2 launch.
I want to start with a Madden NFL 2001 retrospective because I still consider this the biggest leap from one generation to the next in history. Matt took the lead here with a look at his top five launch sports games, and now I’m going to extol the virtues of five of my own this week. We have been doing our look ahead to next-gen sports games and what prior launches can tell us about them, but we also wanted to take this next-gen launch week to look back at some of the best sports games that kicked off a console generation.
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