John Madden Football '93 is a 1992 American football video game developed and published by Electronic Arts for the Super NES and Sega Genesis. The player controls a football team in modes such as tournament play and sudden death. Officially endorsed by John Madden, it was the third Madden game for the Genesis and the second for the SNES, being the first title in the series to receive a simultaneous release on both platforms.

The Genesis version was developed by LookingGlass Technologies, which was simultaneously creating Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss. John Madden Football '93 adds new animations and features, and allows players to play as and against famous teams such as the 1976 Oakland Raiders. Aside from Madden Football 64, the game was the last in the Madden franchise to lack the NFL license, which was featured in Madden NFL '94 onward.

Upon its release, John Madden Football '93 was a commercial success, and went on to sell more than a million copies. Critics awarded the game high scores and praised its updated graphics, but several reviewers complained that little had changed since John Madden Football '92. Royalties from the game funded the expansion of LookingGlass Technologies, and the company's director, Paul Neurath, later commented that the size of these royalties led EA to develop future Madden titles in-house.

The game can be played on the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation version of Madden NFL 2002, as well as the PlayStation versions of Madden NFL 2003 to 2005, including the collector's edition of the latter game on the PlayStation 2, with updated rosters and official NFL team licenses.

Gameplay

250px|left|thumb|The player selects a play. The timer for the quarter is on the right of the screen, while the current down and remaining yards are near the bottom.

John Madden Football '93 is an adaptation of American football that takes place from an isometric perspective in a two-dimensional environment. The player begins each match by selecting such variables as the game mode, weather conditions and team(s). Game modes include pre-season, regular season, playoffs, and sudden death. In addition to the game's single-player mode, two-player competitive and cooperative modes are available.

Development

John Madden Football '93 was developed for the Sega Genesis by LookingGlass Technologies, They were approached by Electronic Arts soon after production on Ultima Underworld began, Neurath said that Electronic Arts was dissatisfied with the work that another studio had been doing on John Madden Football '93, and that the publisher was "scrambling to find a [replacement] team" to meet the game's rapidly approaching deadline. Looking Glass received the source code of John Madden Football '92 and had to develop a sequel in five months. Neurath later said that development was "part out-of-house and part in-house". In 1991, Neurath contracted the outside programmer Mark Lesser, who had previously worked on Mean 18, to develop the game's technical aspects. According to Lesser, this was necessary because none of LookingGlass's employees had experience programming for the Sega Genesis.

Neurath believed that LookingGlass introduced "some nice improvements" to the franchise. A writer for Mega Drive Advanced Gaming believed that "the most obvious addition is the digitised speech", which did not appear in the game's Super NES version. In its November 1992 issue, Electronic Gaming Monthly estimated that the game was "100% complete". The game's Genesis and SNES versions were released at the same time. which prevented the inclusion of official teams, colors, player names and stadiums. Sega's competing title, the Joe Montana-endorsed NFL Sports Talk Football '93, had received the license that year. A prototype of the cancelled Game Boy version was obtained from the Nintendo data leak.

Reception

John Madden Football '93 was a commercial success, with over one million copies sold. It has been cited as the highest-selling game developed by Looking Glass Studios, and Neurath later called it "one of the most successful games I've ever worked on". Carl Rowley of N-Force called the visuals "sharper than ever" and believed that the character sprites were "small but well defined". He found that the game played "brilliantly", and he praised the instant replay feature as "superb" and "amazing". He wrote that his "only niggle is the lack of sampled speech", which he considered to be "a bit of a let down". Finishing his review, Rowley wrote that the game was the "best American football game available".