The Madden video game series needed help, credit Gordon Bellamy for modernizing it (2024)

Gordon Bellamy, just months into his dream job, felt Madden NFL needed to make a significant change.

In 1994, Bellamy was less than a year into his role at Electronic Arts. Back then, Madden had yet to become Madden, the most famous and influential sports video game ever. But Bellamy, an enthusiastic 23-year-old designer and assistant producer of the game, was determined to make Madden a better product, a more true-to-life interactive experience for fans who were eager to score virtual touchdowns through their Sega Genesis console.

Bellamy’s idea was simple but provocative — and it was rooted in what John Madden, the legendary Hall of Fame coach, wanted most when he began producing his annual game in 1988: authenticity.

“I identified the opportunity for inclusion and took accountability to do something about it,” said Bellamy, who at the time was one of the few Black employees at EA. “When you are in the room, then more decisions can be made. I was in the room and just recognized the moment and we all grew together.”

A few people in the room were Madden, executive producer Scott Orr and producer Michael Rubinelli, all of whom were White men who loved football just as much as Bellamy. The group discussed new features for Madden ‘95, how to improve its graphics and make its gameplay smoother. As many of Bellamy’s colleagues began to learn more about him, he was always in favor of making the bold move.

In the previous versions of the game, because of the constraints of 16-bit cartridge technology, all of the players had to have the same skin tone. The players were White. The NFL, however, was then — as it is in 2021 — made up of predominantly Black players. Bellamy advocated to the group, in a move to better portray the league, that the players in Madden ‘95 all be Black.

“That was really helpful and there wasn’t a lot of resistance,” Rubinelli said of Bellamy’s suggestion. “To us, this was just a natural progression in us being real and authentic. John had this real aura and influence about him that it did have to be authentic. If he was going to put his name to it, he wanted it to feel like it was something that he can be proud of.”

Bellamy felt pride the first time he played the game the way he envisioned. The Black players, of course, weren’t as realistic-looking as they are in modern games, but the sprites from the 16-bit cartridge showed the players’ arms and their dark complexion behind their white facemask. For years prior to the EA’s decision, Bellamy had always wanted to see someone like himself reflected in the video game he loved the most, the game where he felt he was truly one of the 22 players on the field.

The Genesis version of Madden ‘95 was also historical in the success of the franchise. For the first time, the game had acquired the licenses of the NFL and the league’s players association. Fans played the game with each team’s players identified by their name and jersey number.

“Players matter,” Rubinelli said. “People identify with Barry Sanders, Thurman Thomas and Emmitt Smith. People love Michael Irvin and Deion Sanders as Prime Time. It’s so deeply personal to these fans.”

The challenge for Rubinelli and Bellamy was that Madden obtained their deal with the player’s association late in the summer of 1994, a week before their deadline to ship the game to Japan for mass production. Bellamy impressed Rubinelli with his aggressiveness to make the game as accurate as possible, accomplishing something that had never been done before in Madden’s history: Instead of using the previous season’s information, Bellamy correctly compiled every team’s roster, and categorized each player’s attributes, ahead of the 1994 season.

Bellamy’s work was fortified by the game’s cover art. A Pro Bowl quarterback or skill-position player, which has since become the norm, didn’t help promote the game. The cover of Madden ‘95 showcased a photoshopped image of two Black linemen, San Francisco 49ers defensive lineman Karl Wilson competing against Dallas Cowboys left tackle Erik Williams as Madden watched from the broadcast booth. The linemen, Bellamy said, were utilized to communicate to fans that all the players, and their numbers, were included in the game, making Madden ‘95 the first football video game to feature Black athletes on the packaging.

Bellamy, 50, knew showing Black players as the default race in Madden would have a major impact on fans and aspiring athletes.

“Something I was very aware of was that young African-American kids would see themselves when they turned on Madden,” said Bellamy, now a cinematic arts professor at USC. “You wouldn’t have to do any mental gymnastics with your imagination to know your place. You can just play.”

Before he became EA’s global rookie of the year in 1994, Bellamy knew his passion for gaming helped prepare him for such a pivotal role in Madden’s illustrious history.

Growing up in Reston, Va., in the 1970s and ‘80s, Bellamy’s favorite NFL team wasn’t his local team. He, instead, was fond of Tom Landry’s Dallas Cowboys for their flex defense and their ability to pass the ball from the shotgun. Bellamy cheered for Preston Pearson and Golden Richards and he thought the Cowboys’ home white jerseys were cool.

Bellamy, though, didn’t play organized football in school.

“I wasn’t a very big kid,” he said. “I was a front-row kid in the class picture.”

Although he wasn’t the best athlete, Bellamy loved sports, especially football, for the narrative journey teams and players have during a season, whether through success or failure. Playing sports games, Bellamy found, was a way to replicate such an experience. He appreciated the structure and fairness in determining the game’s winner while trying to prove his abilities and strategic intelligence in a different manner.

He learned the sport through Strat-o-Matic Football and spent many coins at the arcade to play Atari’s Football X’s and O’s, the first game to popularize the trackball. Hours playing Tudor’s Electric Football was instrumental for Bellamy because it was the first time that he could contextualize, at a slower speed, the action he watched on TV.

“You need to synthesize, which is part of the beauty of the sport, all the heroics of individuals driving this collective greatness,” he said.

The person he most often watched games with was Mary Mapson, his great-aunt. As a high school student, Bellamy bonded with Mapson during NFL games, and they both had an invested interest in Doug Williams during the 1987 season. Once Williams was named Washington’s starter late in the season, he became the first Black quarterback to start and lead his teammates to a Super Bowl victory, an achievement that inspired Bellamy and Mapson.

“I just viscerally remember how excited she was about Doug Williams,” Bellamy said. “She just loved it, and he went through it all trying to make it happen.”

Bellamy arrived at Harvard to pursue a degree in engineering. But by 1992, he had become fascinated with the possibility of two different careers. An avid reader of Sports Illustrated, Bellamy wrote for Harvard’s student newspaper, even writing a piece on the World League of American Football. The Genesis was also the first console he purchased. He played Madden in his dorm room and contemplated the game’s design before he knew there was such an industry. ESPN and EA rejected Bellamy when he sent his résumé.

Staying persistent, Bellamy’s next tactic was to cold call anyone at EA who was associated with Madden to see if there was an open entry-level position. Several people hung up on Bellamy. But Jim Simmons, a programmer and designer for NHL hockey, offered Bellamy a video game tester test at EA’s headquarters in San Mateo, Calif. Bellamy arrived during his spring break, and his big test was to play a game for an hour — with software that included several bugs — to see if he had a keen understanding of how gameplay should be designed. He excelled in such a way that he needed more paper than was originally given to him to write down all the errors.

“By luck, they gave me Bulls vs. Blazers (and the NBA Playoffs) game,” he said. “I’m fairly secular, but I was like, ‘Thank you!’ I was born for it. I was like, ‘You don’t know how many things are wrong!’ I rocked it.”

As a summer intern in 1993, Bellamy was a product tester who programmed players statistics for Madden ‘94.

Rubinelli and Bellamy became friends within weeks. Rubinelli joined EA in an unconventional way, too. He started a few years earlier in the marketing department before transitioning into a producer where he too noticed a problem in Madden’s gameplay involving the game’s wonky pass interference rules. Creating any change within Madden, when millions of people were anticipating the game’s next version, was intoxicating, Rubinelli said. He noticed that Bellamy was just as allured by such opportunities to enhance the Madden brand.

“He’s so unapologetically himself, which I love about him,” Rubinelli said of Bellamy. “Loved his enthusiasm. He and I are kind of very similar in that we both, you know, talk a lot of sh*t. As you can imagine, that kind of bond will get you pretty far in the gaming world.

“We had so much fun working together. We really injected energy into the halls of EA. We just built and built and built.”

One of the early goals for Rubinelli and Bellamy was to make Madden ‘95 a more balanced game. Sure, most fans of the game wanted to see how many points they could score, but Rubinelli felt the game should provide just as much joy when on defense. Rubinelli, Bellamy and William Robinson, the lead programmer, worked to adjust the pursuit angles for linebackers and defensive backs. Pass rushers could execute spin and swim moves to generate pressure on the quarterback. Bellamy supported Rubinelli by executing the design of 44 new defensive plays in the game, which allowed him to study playbooks from various teams to replicate how a team operated.

Madden ‘95 introduced a larger field to have appropriate proportional dimensions for the size of the players. New animations let skill-position players stiff-arm defenders and high step into the end zone. With the removal of passing windows, the player who controlled the quarterback just needed to read man or zone coverage from the defense before pressing an assigned button to pass to the receiver. And after scoring a touchdown, players had the option to execute a two-point conversion.

“It was like a dream,” said Rubinelli, Mogul’s CEO. “Every day, I’d be like, ‘I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.’”

When he was back at Harvard, Bellamy began assembling each team’s roster for the upcoming 1994 season, adjusting his sheets every few weeks during the league’s new free-agency period. He did such by using a fax machine in his dorm room to request and collect an updated roster from each team. A large binder, including rookie players after the NFL Draft, proved Bellamy’s obsession by including the name and jersey number of every team’s top 48 players — and allowing each player to be substituted by another in any formation — into the game when he returned to EA.

“Before then, you’d be like, ‘This is dumb,’” Bellamy said, who graduated from Harvard in 1995. “Under Black quarterback history, this is like around the time when Warren Moon was moving (from the Houston Oilers to the Minnesota Vikings). You can’t have Warren Moon on the wrong team, right?

“I literally wouldn’t let it go. You need every player. It was worth it.”

Madden ‘95 was a massive success. Fans enjoyed the plethora of features, the ability to play through the entire 1994 season with accurate rosters and the balanced, dynamic gameplay. Time Magazine called the game outstanding, naming it the best football game of the decade.

Once the game was released, Bellamy knew he had already begun his own journey to becoming a leader at EA. He was thrilled that he could influence the gaming industry through the context of football. The next step, Bellamy told Rubinelli, was that they should help democratize EA’s hiring process by recruiting and adding more staff members, with stronger diversity as a mission, to ensure Madden ‘96 was superior to its predecessor.

“There’s a big difference between cosmetic change and systemic change,” Bellamy said. “What I wanted to very consciously do was to reach back and help cultivate a generation of not only diverse, but outstanding voices in our game space.”

Usenet message boards, as the internet became more prominent in 1995, became the tool Bellamy and Rubinelli used to share their plan to hire more summer interns to start as product testers. During the week of the Super Bowl that year, Bellamy and Rubinelli spent time in Miami reviewing more than 250 résumés.

Following lengthy interviews with 50 candidates, Bellamy and Rubinelli made job offers to 25 people.

“Every single one of those people said, ‘Yes, I’ll do it,’” Rubinelli said. “It was a bit of a pilgrimage to Mecca. You realize this is so profound to people, the impact it has on people’s lives in a positive way. It can make them feel uplifted.”

One of the new members was Brian Jackson, a programmer who graduated from Howard University in 1992. Jackson introduced himself to Bellamy in an email after seeing one of the message boards. When he was in college, Jackson held Madden tournaments in his dorm room, a tradition he continued with his colleagues at GE Aerospace.

“It was a running joke that when Madden came out, we would all take that day off, go to somebody’s house and we’d all play it all day,” Jackson said. “That was a holiday for us.”

When Bellamy and Rubinelli called for an interview, Jackson answered their first question — What are you doing? — with quite an answer: He was playing Madden ‘95. Jackson, of course, was stunned when he learned that Bellamy, Rubinelli and others at EA were paid to develop, design and play video games.

The day before Jackson’s flight for an in-person interview, Bellamy told him not to wear a suit. Instead, Jackson was instructed to arrive at EA donning a Philadelphia Eagles jersey since he was from Ardmore, PA. One of Jackson’s tests was to play a game against Foster Birch, who managed player ratings.

“At the time, I was smoking people,” Jackson said. “First down, shut him down; second down, shut him down; third down, shut him down. On fourth down, I see him call a punt play. I’m like, ‘Dude, what are you doing?’ He’s like, ‘I’m going to kick.’ I said, ‘You don’t want to do that. I can block every kick in the game.’ He’s like, we took that functionality out of the game.”

Jackson substituted one of the special teams players with the Eagles’ fastest player. As soon as the ball was snapped, Jackson’s player tackled Birch’s punter before the punt animation could occur.

A couple of weeks later, Jackson began working at EA and was charged with handling each team’s playbook in Madden ‘96. He often watched NFL games to study the team’s offensive play-calling tendencies to decide the ratio of that team’s running and passing plays within their Madden playbook. Jackson’s roommate in Silicon Valley during that time was Robert Jones, an industrial engineer who joined the Madden team as a tester before becoming a producer.

“Gordon is definitely a pioneer for African Americans in the video game industry,” Jackson said of Bellamy. “Without there being a Gordon at EA, there might not have been a Brian or a Rob at EA because it was Gordon who pushed to have us. He took a risk on me and Rob and it worked out for the best.”

With the addition of the newcomers, Madden ‘96 had more features than its previous version. Each player’s number was added to his jersey, fans could run 240 new plays and player animations included laterals, one-handed catches and cornerbacks jamming receivers at the line of scrimmage.

“In the equity of things, I also thought Steve Young was awesome, so we had to have left-handed quarterbacks,” Bellamy said. “I’m also left-handed.”

Fans could also unlock several classic teams, including each year’s Super Bowl champions. One of the game’s greatest ideas was giving fans the ability to create their own player at any position. The created player then went through various drills, such as the 40-yard dash and the open-field tackling, at the league’s scouting combine to determine their rating before being selected in the draft.

For the first time, fans could be their favorite team’s general manager, whether trading players or signing free agents.

“I did the salary cap,” Bellamy said. “You couldn’t make trades to make your team too stacked. People want freedom. I’m like, ‘You can have all the freedom you want, but you’ve just got to be under the cap.’”

In the years since Madden ‘96 was released, Bellamy has often said that EA’s best rookie class was the group of people that he helped hire in 1995. Following Bellamy’s path, Jackson and Jones helped hire more Black interns at EA in the late 1990s. Jackson, a software engineer, helped design games for more than 15 years. Known for leading NBA 2K’s production team, Jones returned to EA last year as a senior producer. Other prominent members, such as Jeremy Strauser, Dan Baker, Marsh Gardiner and Curtis Cherrington, are either still working in the industry or spent more than five years at EA.

Bellamy cherished how everyone in the group came from different backgrounds, but that they all shared the same goal as when he joined EA. Bellamy, more than 25 years later, is grateful that his contributions helped refine Madden into becoming, and remaining, the finest football video game.

“They’re like my coaching tree,” he said of his former colleagues. “That positive representation is as important as ever.”

(Illustrations: Wes McCabe)