EA’s ‘Madden NFL’ Chief Talks Amazon Docuseries ‘It’s in the Game’

Along with its much-promoted Black Friday NFL game, Amazon is serving up a side helping of holiday sports content this week with its new docuseries about the history of the top-selling video game based on pigskin: “Madden NFL.”
And no, the timing is not a coincidence, as “Madden” publisher EA Sports is keenly aware of the association between Hall of Fame football coach and iconic commentator John Madden, for whom the franchise is named, and Turkey Day.
“Thanksgiving is synonymous with Coach Madden. He called something like 20 Thanksgiving games as an announcer and was part of a lot of different holiday traditions with that,” EA Sports senior vice president and general manager Daryl Holt told Variety. “It became a calling card of football around the Thanksgiving holiday.”
Throughout his life, Madden was closely involved in the development of the game — formerly known as “John Madden Football,” until EA struck its long-running rights deal with the NFL in 1990 — and Holt said EA Sports has been considering ways to tell the story of the franchise and Madden’s influence for years. Then along came Amazon, which has been working overtime to solidify its standing in the football community since setting its pact air “Thursday Night Football” from 2023 to 2033.
Popular on Variety
“The filmmakers and Amazon approached us, but we were already pretty receptive because we’ve been thinking about ways to tell the story and the legacy of Coach Madden’s involvement, the longevity of ‘Madden NFL‘ as a franchise, now 36 years in the making and continuing,” Holt said. “So that opportunity, as it presented itself, was a natural one for us to say, let’s dive deeper and see how we can make this work. I’m glad we were able to get together a great relationship with Prime and the filmmakers, and to peel back the curtain and open the archives for some things that we’ve never really shared or talked about.”
Per Amazon’s Prime Video, “It’s in the Game: Madden NFL” reveals “the never-been-told story of Madden NFL, from its archaic 8-bit origins to its success as an annual must have — against all odds. What started as an unlikely pairing between a computer whiz and a football legend, ignited a revolution and triggered a seismic collision between the worlds of jocks and geeks. They should have failed. Instead, their game changed the game — and our culture, too.”
The four-part series, which features Holt, among other current EA Sports execs and “Madden NFL” team members, includes never-been-seen footage from throughout the making of the three-decade-old franchise, and also shows developers putting the finishing touches on next year’s “Madden NFL 25.”
“It is a huge challenge to make a game as deep and as big as ‘Madden’ every year, and it’s complex. It’s the most complex sports game to make,” Holt said. “So there will be things behind the scenes that they’ll understand better. There’ll be views of game developers in different ways, both past and present, on how this stuff works and how it comes together and the challenges that might pop up. And I’m hopeful that that understanding gives them a greater appreciation for something they already love.”
Produced by A+E Factual Studios group, Michael Strahan’s SMAC Productions, Misher Film and MTP and directed by Nathan Caswell and Jeremiah Zagar, the doc is meant to appeal to both longtime fans of the “Madden” franchise, as well as a younger demographic that entered into the NFL game at a very different time for the sport.
“You have to look at all the fans of Madden, and there’s obviously two schools that you could simplistically carve out the generations, which is a new generation of fans that might consume sports differently — they probably follow athletes and highlights, and not necessarily sitting on the couch watching a football game for three or four hours — and then others that have grown up with the sport and remember John Madden as a coach, or certainly as a Hall of Fame broadcaster and coach,” Holt said. “So all those things come together in the docuseries for people to understand what is it about ‘Madden,’ in terms of how it started, how long it’s been around, what it takes to make the game through the nostalgic journey that is the past, as well as the current juxtaposition with ‘Madden NFL 25’ development.”