Back in 2020, I published a back-in-my-day article offering my old fogy-take on a Nintendo Switch Joy-Con grip designed to also hold one’s cell phone (mind I was still using my legacy BlackBerry Classic when I wrote that). It has been too long since I wrote a fogy video game analysis article. My subsequent back-in-my-day video game articles have been more upbeat and nostalgic. For example, I published my thoughts on the 20-year anniversary of the North American release of Pokémon Gold and Silver, on more Pokémon memories with a look forward, and on the 12 games that left the biggest impression on me. It is somewhat nauseating. We need more fogy content. But fogy content requires inspiration. Fortunately, I found some inspiration in a May report from Tom’s Hardware titled EA is looking at putting in-game ads in AAA games – ‘We’ll be very thoughtful as we move into that,’ says CEO. To be sure, that sounds like a bad headline. I did demonstrate with respect to one video game headline that bad headlines are sometimes worse than the actual story.
This, however, is not one of those occasions. The headline is accurate. I quote the opening paragraph of the report:
EA CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed the company is considering putting ads in traditional AAA games — titles that players purchase up-front for around $70 apiece. In the Q&A part of EA’s latest earnings call, Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs asked Wilson about dynamic ad insertion in traditional AAA games. Wilson said, ‘…Advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us.’ He then continued, ‘…we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences.’
I am sure that EA will be thoughtful about shoving garbage ads down the throats of their customers. It is the thought that counts, after all. By the way, what does EA even make these days? I have spent more time with the mid-2000s doujin visual novel localization scene than with the AAA gaming scene.
In the interest of charity – I will say that $70 is not too shocking. Back in my day in the late 90s, I recall many new games were $50 and even Game Boy and Game Boy Color games were at least $30, maybe $35 in some cases. If anything, it is surprising how long games hung around $50 or $60 with inflation. They have been more stable than some things I like at the grocery store. You know I was able to buy cheap enoki mushrooms before 2020. Now? I cut them out of my diet – just not worth the price. They are good though.
But I digress.
I may not know what EA is up to these days, but I was an EA fan back in the day. I have actually noted this in The New Leaf Journal. Here, we are using noted literally. If you turn to the Honorable Mentions section of my list of the 10 video games which left the biggest impression on me you will find the following entry:
NBA Live 98 (Sega Genesis) [I will guess this is the game I logged the most total hours with in the 90s]
The Sega Genesis NBA Live 98 was awesome (despite being an afterthought because Genesis was a zombie console by that point). It had some fun side games. The 3-point shootout was great. I wished it had a dunk contest at the time but if we are being honest, in hindsight I am not sure how a Sega Genesis slam dunk contest would have gone.
NBA Live was EA’s flagship basketball game series. It was not always NBA live. It grew out of a series of games with titles that encompassed the previous NBA Final’s matchup followed by “and the NBA playoffs.” For example, the last of the predecessor series was Bulls vs Blazers and the NBA Playoffs. I referenced the earlier series in an article title. But I digress. The NBA Live series began with NBA Live 95 and continued for a while longer. 98 was the last entry for Sega Genesis. I actually went back and purchased 95-97 and at least two of the three NBA Playoffs entries at used game stores. I moved on with NBA Live and the Nintendo 64 (I received my N64 in 1998) and got NBA Live 99 and 2000 for that. 99 was fun because the cover player was Antoine Walker, one of my all-time favorites and three-point bomber extraordinaire (don’t let anyone tell you he was a chucker, the man was a marksman). Of course, 1999 was before his “because there are no 4s” era, but I digress again.
Fans of NBA video game history will know what happened next. NBA Live 2000 was alright, but Sega started its own basketball series for the Sega Dreamcast called NBA 2K. NBA 2K more or less stuffed NBA Live into a locker from the word go, and the situation grew worse when Sega’s last flagship console went the way of failed consoles before it, releasing NBA 2K to all consoles and rendering NBA Live an on-again/off-again afterthought. Aside: The Dreamcast NBA 2Ks (NBA 2K, 2K1, and 2K2) had the best free throw shooting in any game thanks to the great shoulder button triggers on the Dreamcast controller, but I digress again. I have not played NBA 2K in a while but I understand it went the way of microtransactions, otherwise known as flaming garbage. I would say I digress but for the fact that this brings us full circle.
So back in my day, you could buy a big EA game, for example NBA Live, and that was it. You had NBA Live. EA was not beaming you ads or demanding that you give it more money to win prizes that would allow you to compete with people spending their life savings to win a video game on the internet. Cartridges were fun. Sure, sports games always had the thing where they released mildly different versions year after year – I will readily concede that NBA Live 98 is not too easily distinguishable from 95 in many respects (at least on the Genesis). But if you did not like that, you could use the create a player tools to update the game yourself and avoid buying a new copy.
What a concept man. Buy the game once. Its yours. No ads. Enjoy the game. Have some friends over and play it in person. Well, I never did the latter. But you get the idea.
This reminded me of another story – another story from a time when EA was not yet trying to thoughtfully advertise (and probably spy) on people who mistakenly think they are buying its games. In the early 2000s, I got into NFL and college football largely because I was interested in trying Madden and the early iteration of EA’s NCAA football games. (The other reason was that I thought I may as well since I watched a good amount of ESPN and ESPN was very football centric in the early 2000s – their NBA coverage only picked up after ABC won the main NBA rights from NBC). While Sega wrecked EA on the basketball front, EA managed to completely box Sega out of the football game market by signing an exclusive deal with the NFL. My first Madden game was 2002 and I am pretty sure I played every entry through 2008 – most on Microsoft Xbox in my case (the original Xbox was my only Xbox). I was never too great at the in-game football – I probably spent more time managing teams in franchise mode. But it was fun.
One effect of getting into football was that it gave me something to talk about in high school – granting that was never the plan because I started following it in my last year of elementary school. A good number of the boys in my year were sports fans – but not many followed basketball. Some were baseball fans, a couple were basketball fans, but we all liked football. Football was the common ground – albeit my school only had basketball and baseball teams.
I have plenty of NFL debate stories from the mid-to-late 2000s, but I will share one here that is related to EA and the Madden series. Just a few days after reading the EA article, I read a piece by Neil Paine (I highly recommend his blog, which has an RSS feed, if you are interested in sports statistics) titled A.J. Smith’s Chargers Did Everything but Win. The late A.J. Smith was general manager of the San Diego Chargers (now “Los Angeles” for the kids) for much of the 2000s. They were indeed a consistently good team – but never quite made it to a Super Bowl, much less won one. We had some debates about them in high school because, unlike most of the other NFL fans, I followed college football and was a big Philip Rivers believer (drafted in 2003, the Chargers’ starting quarterback from 2006-2019) from the beginning. I still remember how he lit up the 2003 Senior Bowl with some gorgeous throws. But I digress.
Early in my senior year of high school, not long after I hand-crafted a new template for the school newspaper in Microsoft Publisher, a group of us went to the house of one of our former classmates who had switched high schools for his senior year. I had visited him a couple of times in previous years – so I knew something about his place. The kid had a man cave in the basement. The real deal. It was dark, carpeted, and leather couches and sofas surrounding a big TV with game consoles. He was a huge Star Wars fan – the kind who giggled uncontrollably at the sight of George Lucas – so you had the Star Wars stuff and the New York Giants stuff. We had a good time. They were playing Madden – I don’t remember if I got in one of the games. One of the guys there had a tendency to say the darndest things. For example, if someone made a joke that was not funny, he would put his arm around the guy, take him aside (not too aside), and say something like (let’s pretend the bad-joke maker’s name was Justin):
Come here. Justin. Justin. No stop. Stop. Listen to me. That wasn’t funny. If I had been laughing, and then I heard that joke, I would stop laughing. Do you know why? Because that wasn’t funny. Do you understand?
I still think of the if I had been laughing sequence when I someone says something that he or she thinks is funny but is not, in fact, funny.
But I digress.
Anyway, the kid who lectured his peers about unfunny jokes was playing Madden. He was using the Chargers. Note he was not a Chargers fan – he was a Jets fan. Oddly he was a Yankees fan for baseball. It usually went Jets-Mets or Giants-Yankees. To the best of my recollection, he was the only Jets-Yankees fan (granted we had Steelers-Yankees and 49ers-Yankees fans, so things were sometimes complicated). But I digress again. I heard him keep yelling “GATESSS!” For those not in the know, Antonio Gates was an all-pro tight end for the Chargers – he also had a unique story, having played basketball instead of football in college. This kid kept throwing to Gates and pumping his fist and yelling “GATESSS!” every time it worked out.
It became a thing throughout the year. Sometimes he would just yell “GATESSS!” I think some others adopted it too. Just try it when someone does something good. It is catchy.
Anyway – that is my positive fogy story. Can there be a positive fogy story? I can bring this back to fogy land. See back in my day we could all buy Madden and then play it at our leisure without being advertised at or leaned on to engage in so-called “microtransactions.” While I think online play was already sort of a thing back then (I never tried so I am not an expert on the mid-2000s online gaming scene), people still had the understanding that they could, say, visit their teenage friend’s football man cave and play some Madden. When you get together like that – you can have fun and pick up new phrases like “GATESSS!”
Of course, that was the only time I ever actually played Madden with anyone (assuming I played – that I do not remember), so take this with a grain of salt. I was more of a solo gamer. As I explained – there are many life lessons to learn from playing Mario Party against the computer.
