We are one step closer to having Madden NFL 23 on the shelves. On Tuesday, EA Sports announced that the cover athlete for the upcoming NFL video game will be revealed on Wednesday, June 1 at 10 a.m. ET. With this being the first many believe he will be on the cover.
Madden, who is responsible for the Madden franchise, died in December at the age of 85. When the Madden video game franchise first launched, Madden was always on the cover. He would then share the cover with an NFL player, but it wasn’t until Madden NFL 2001 when the former Oakland Raiders head coach and NFL broadcaster wasn’t on the cover at all. He did appear on the Hall of Fame Edition of Madden NFL 07, but it’s been about the top NFL players when it comes to the cover.
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In an interview with ESPN in Jan. 2021, Madden talked about the evolution of his video game. “If it’s in the game of pro football, we wanted it to be in the video game,” Madden said. “When I was first involved, it was drawing up plays and players. I let them have my playbook and gave them an understanding of what a playbook is. Then it became a thing where we would pick up players, their words and stuff like that as we went along. But I think the biggest thing was when we received the film from the NFL. Until then we had to go get the plays and the offense and the nomenclature from different cultures. And sometimes it was a college coach and we got discombobulated there sometimes.”
Madden NFL 23 doesn’t have a release date but it will likely be released at the end of August since that was the release date for Madden NFL 22. Madden is the only NFL video game on the market as Electronic Arts acquired the right to use NFL teams and players back in 1993. There have been other NFL video games over the years, but Madden has been around the longest.
“Football has been my whole life,” Madden said in the ESPN interview. “I really think that I’m lucky that I never had a job, you know, I never worked. I played in high school. I played in college, and I played in the pros for a short time. And then I went into coaching and coached the rest of my time. And then I got out of coaching and went into broadcasting and then the video game … that’s been my life.”
