From John Madden Football in 1989 to the twentieth anniversary edition coming out next month, the series has certainly had its share of epic successes and epic failures when it comes to introducing new features yearly. Hopefully, in Madden 09 it will be more than just a classified roster update.

One of the complaints that gamers have regarding the Madden franchise, whether they're fans of it or not, is that the game "...is just a roster update" and never has any new features. Whether that's true or not is another debate that's largely semantic, but something that we can look at and actually analyze is how successful the features implemented in each year's version of Madden actually are. Do the new features introduced in Madden actually stick around? How often do they get retooled? By starting back at the initial release of John Madden Football for the Sega Genesis and SNES in 1990, we can actually see if the game's newest features become established hits or epic failures.

NSX via sports.ign.com »