The first episode of “It’s In The Game” was about EA’s struggle to get Madden off the ground. The second episode is more about the fruit of their labor and the risks it took to get there. 

EA had a hit with Madden. With that came new fans and more perspectives that eventually made the series the perennial sales giant it is today.

Gordon’s Grind

To really hone in on the episode’s title, “Pressure Makes Diamonds”, “It’s In The Game” introduces viewers to another living legend in Gordon Bellamy. The show painted him as a young upstart fresh out of college who absolutely loved sports. He got his start at EA by calling pretty much every name he saw in Madden’s credits. That determination eventually landed him an internship with the gaming giant that focused on quality assurance (QA).

For those unaware, QA in the video game industry is less about determining how good a game is and more about what’s wrong with it. QA staffers are paid to play games for hours on end to find bugs and break the game. They submit their findings to the developers to fix the problems. It’s a fairly straightforward, entry-level job. The thing is EA didn’t just make Madden. EA has a portfolio of titles across several genres aimed at different people. That means a job in QA can mean people can be assigned to an undesired game.

Luckily, Bellamy was assigned a basketball game. It was the perfect situation for him as a sports fan. All the notes he took were exactly what EA wanted. This led to a permanent job where he made a huge impact with ideas that are taken for granted these days.

Pressure Makes Diamonds

By the time Bellamy was on the official staff, Madden already had several competitors, so it was important to have a leg up. At the time, the game just had the teams and player’s numbers to indicate who the players were. So if you were using the San Francisco 49ers, you weren’t really using Steve Young to throw to Jerry Rice. You were using #8 to throw the ball to #80. In order to have these names in the game, you needed permission from the NFLPA. EA didn’t.

The show cuts to somebody opening a locked drawer and finding an unlabeled game cartridge in it. This is when Bellamy told the story about how he shipped code of the game with all the official NFL rosters in it before a deal was put in place. This is a move that loses jobs, and in an industry as small as gaming was at the time, it ends careers. Other former EA employees on the show were careful to mention that Bellamy was someone that didn’t lack in confidence.

“I got sent home from Madden for helping Madden.”

That gamble panned out and forever changed the sports, gaming, and media landscape. EA SPORTS’ mantra of “It’s in the game” seemed truer than ever.

It wasn’t just this gamble that made Bellamy’s time so memorable. He also had the presence of mind to insist on saving a few colors for the sprites and animations for the purpose of having the appropriate skin color for each player. As both a black and queer person, it had some real personal meaning to Bellamy (and players around the world).

Having real athletes in a sports video game is a given today, so seeing all the risks and work it took to make this happen was really a captivating story. The producers did a good job actually bringing Bellamy on to tell the story from his perspective, and it did an equally good job allowing him to showcase his exuberance in the episode.

Madden Ratings and the Madden Bowl still make Madden the talk of the town

The biggest reason why Bellamy’s story is so captivating is because his contributions to the series are almost as big as the franchise itself. The NFL is the most popular sport in America, and no matter how good or bad Madden is, it has the attention of both the sports and gaming world.

With the inclusion of NFL players, the NFL players themselves now had a reason to be into the series. NFL Hall of Famer and former defensive end Michael Strahan said “[t]o a player, there’s nothing better than seeing your name on the back of a jersey in Madden,” but it doesn’t end there. These are the best football players in the world, and oftentimes they felt their ratings never accounted for it. Everybody wanted to be bigger, stronger, and faster than the rating the game gave them. Eventually, the criticism got to a point where EA hired former Bengals legend Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson to be a part of the ratings team.

It was one thing to have a passionate fanbase of gamers, but adding actual professional football players to the pool of people criticizing your game easily made things tough, and seeing the story behind that was also a nice choice. Again, though, it wasn’t always the gamers.

Madden also got big in the hip-hop scene, and it got to the point where EA went ahead and started planning tournament events that happened during the Super Bowl called the Madden Bowl, which originally pit musical artists against football players in games of Madden.

Will anything ever top Madden?

It took a few years to get there, but Madden was on top of the world. It was one thing to have the best football on the market, but the love from the fans, the players, celebrities, and even John Madden himself really put EA and the EA SPORTS brand on the map, but eventually some actual competition came, and that’s where things really get interesting.

Overall, this episode was a lot stronger than the pilot episode because of the focus on Bellamy’s remarkable story. His contribution is something the average Joe won’t know, while also giving the episode a deservedly uplifting feeling as it transitioned to the successes. The episode also did a solid job in preparing a transition to the next episode and second half of this four-part series.

Editor’s Note: Danreb Victorio is a former Electronic Arts employee assigned to another product. The views in this review in no way reflect his former employer’s views.

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