Development
As part of the marketing of the new Sega Genesis, Sega of America president and CEO Michael Katz planned to create a library of instantly-recognizable titles for the console by contracting with celebrities and athletes to produce games using their names and likenesses. As part of this, Sega signed a US$1.7 million five-year contract with Joe Montana, despite concerns among the Japanese executives that the game would not earn enough to cover this cost.
Since Sega of America did not at the time have a large game production facility and Sega of Japan had never designed a football game, Sega contracted with Mediagenic to develop the game for November 1989. No one at Sega was aware of the turmoil inside Mediagenic at the time; despite five months of reports that development was proceeding on schedule, Katz discovered in September or October that the game was hardly begun. To have a football game for Christmas release, Sega would have to find an already-completed game that could be converted.
Mediagenic did develop a DOS version of the game (contractor Mindspan) and it was published in 1990 ( MobyGames ). The opening video clip was the first commercial use of the video playback system (developed at Mediagenic) that would later be used in "The Return to Zork".
Sega approached Electronic Arts, developer of the Madden NFL series, and president Trip Hawkins agreed to help. Joe Montana Football missed the Christmas deadline and was released in January 1991, shortly after the Genesis version of John Madden Football.
Read more about this topic: Joe Montana Football
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality.
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And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“For the child whose impulsiveness is indulged, who retains his primitive-discharge mechanisms, is not only an ill-behaved child but a child whose intellectual development is slowed down. No matter how well he is endowed intellectually, if direct action and immediate gratification are the guiding principles of his behavior, there will be less incentive to develop the higher mental processes, to reason, to employ the imagination creatively. . . .”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the “philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)