4.05.10 11:16 am by Brian
Here at The Sports Geeks, it isn’t all just sporting news and analysis; we like to touch on how sports play a role in other aspects of daily life as well. For this article, I’m taking a look at EA Sports’ Madden NFL video game franchise and a potential opportunity for this year’s demo to help teach fans about this year’s new playoff overtime rules.
Edit: Thanks go out to PastaPadre, a leader in the sports video game community, for mentioning this story in his April 13th, 2010 write-up on the Madden NFL 11 demo.
In the video game business, few games are as sure a sale as EA Sports’ yearly incarnation of the Madden NFL series. Since an exclusivity deal was struck between the NFL and EA Sports in December of 2004, the series has been the only officially-licensed video game representation of the league. While this move angered fans of the NFL 2K Sports series of football games, sales of Madden NFL have not shown any signs of slowing down; such is the safety of being the only licensed product on the market.
With the introduction of the current console generation, the Madden NFL team has put out a downloadable game demo on the online services for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 before the retail release of the full title for the past few versions of their title. Some might argue the necessity of such a demo—given that consumers surely know from year-to-year whether or not they’ll be making a purchase—but in some ways the demo has come to serve the role of a “teaser,” satisfying the appetites of gamers waiting for the new iteration of the game as the season approaches.
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6.19.09 8:46 pm by Alex
Sports fans have a habbit of assigning nicknames to everything. Players, coaches, even stadiums and arenas. Here are, in my opinion, the top 10 sporting venue nicknames in the U.S. along with a bit of info about each stadium (and whatever else I dug up that happened to be interesting).
A few that didn’t quite make the list: “The Dean Dome” (Dean Smith Center, Chappel Hill, NC), “The Trop” (Tropicana Field, St. Petersburg, FL), “The Igloo” (Mellon Arena, Pittsburgh, PA), “The Q” (Quicken Loans Arena, Cleveland, OH).
10. “The Vet” – Veterans Stadium, Philadelphia, PA - Some of the nicknames on this list have someone mysterious origins, but its not hard to imagine how someone came up with “The Vet”. Once home to the Phillies and the Eagles, the stadium, destroyed in 2004, was notorious for the poorly installed artificial surface, so much so that the turf earned its own nickname: “Field of Seams.” Even after the turf was redone, Baltimore Ravens’ coach Brian Billick refused to let his team take the field for a preseason game after seeing the condition, resulting in the cancellation of the game.
9. “Death Valley” – Tiger Stadium, Baton Rouge, LA – Home of the Louisiana State University Tigers, “Death Valley” is widely regarded as the loudest stadium in college football, with recorded decibel noise levels of 119 and 130. The nickname was originally “deaf valley” because of the voluminous cheering of the 92,000 fans, but over time, I was misunderstood and became “Death Valley”. Clemson fans call their stadium “Death Valley” too, but I’d give the nod to LSU because of the program’s overall reputation and recent success.
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