Development
John Madden Football '93 was developed for the Sega Genesis by Blue Sky Productions (credited as "Looking Glass Technology"), which was simultaneously working on Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss. The game was not a port, but was rather an original work by the company. They were approached by Electronic Arts soon after production on Ultima Underworld began, an event that company head Paul Neurath later attributed to contacts he had within the publisher, due to his involvement with the Electronic Arts-published Ned Lerner project Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer. 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 team" to meet the game's rapidly approaching deadline. Blue Sky received the source code of the previous John Madden Football title and had to develop a sequel in five months. Neurath later said that development was "part out-of-house and part in-house". The game's visuals were made by Doug Wike, who also created graphics for Ultima Underworld. 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 Blue Sky's employees had experience programming for the Sega Genesis.
Neurath believed that Blue Sky introduced "some nice improvements" to the franchise. A preview in Mega noted that the game had "a lot of added animation" compared to its predecessors, including head-butting, stumbling and one-handed catches. A preview writer for Mega Drive Advanced Gaming believed that "the most obvious addition is the digitised speech", such as that recorded by John Madden, although this did not appear in the game's Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) 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. As with earlier John Madden Football titles, John Madden Football '93 lacks the NFL license; and so it does not have any official teams or colors, and it does not use real player and stadium names. Sega's competing title, the Joe Montana-endorsed NFL Sports Talk Football '93, had received the license that year.
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