With every new football season, there comes the annual edition of Madden. EA still maintains an exclusive contract with the NFL to publish football games based on the license. But did you know Madden ’96 never saw a release. The game even had a four-page spread on Next Generation magazine — if any of you remember.

Polygon gets a behind-the-scenes take on what exactly happened and why the game didn’t ship. Back in 1995, EA was building a new game with early development on the PlayStation. Unfortunately for the company, it never released due to being overly ambitious, new tech, and changing of the guards. Heck, even the development kit was only documented in Japanese.



“So many things happened as a result of that project,” says Michael Rubinelli, who became Madden ’96’s lead producer at Electronic Arts. “When you look at the cause and effect, the ripples of that are still felt today.”

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Why Madden 96 Never Released on the PlaySation