John Madden's influence on EA's Madden games went way beyond the cover

Madden, the former Super Bowl-winning coach of the Oakland Raiders, first leant his name to the video game series in 1988 with the stipulation that the game be realistic and representative of actual NFL football. That started with a requirement that the game feature 11 players on each side of the ball, a massive computational challenge for the hardware of the early 1990s. Once solved -- thanks in part to the help of developers at Bethesda Softworks and their game "Gridiron!"