It's fun to look back at awards shows and laugh at how much they got wrong. Only time tells us which pieces of art can stand its test. Milli Vanilli was the hottest act the year they won Best New Artist. How Green Was My Valley impressed the voters way more than Citizen Kane. In fairness, nobody back then even thought they'd still be giving Oscars out decades later, let alone that we'd be able to go back and lampoon their picks. But recently people are revisiting the 2002 Video Game Awards, still under the auspices of Spike TV and disrespecting the good name of Madden 04. Let a gaming grandpa tell you a story.
There was a time when we had multiple publishers making football games. We had Madden, NFL Gameday, NFL Fever, and yes, the late, great NFL 2K. We weren't just eating well, we were getting manna from the gaming gods. We were even getting great arcade style games such as NFL Blitz and Mutant League Football.
Don't get me wrong, the Spike Game Awards had a good field to choose from in 2003. Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Beyond Good and Evil, and Soul Calibur II were among the luminaries. You could easily argue that a stacked field beat up on each other, yielding an unusual outcome.
But 2003 were also the days before anything could be patched after release. If something launched unbalanced in a game, it stayed that way. Michael Vick changed actual football as an athlete, thus he had to change the way Madden designed its game. Producers initially told ratings czar Donny Moore that Vick would break the game if he launched with 95 speed. QBs had never been faster than 89 before, and even that allowed options most teams couldn't defend.
The more he watched film of Vick, the more he stuck to his guns. It's a good thing he did, because we probably wouldn't remember Madden 04 as well if he hadn't. Because of his dogfighting conviction and the long road back to the NFL, the "Michael Jordan of football" didn't deliver on his full promise. But anybody who played Madden 04 will never forget the insane throws, the 90-yard QB scrambles, or the fistfights that occurred in dorm rooms.
After Vick quite literally ran roughshod over everybody, Madden added a whole suite of defensive tools to contain offensive threats. That led to Madden 05 and the debut of the Hit Stick, an innovation EA is still building on today.
Did the fact that these were still the "Spike TV Game Awards" probably hold too much sway? Sure, all award shows have biases. But I'd argue those have hurt sports games over the years far more than they have helped. NBA Jam didn't sweep award ballots in 1993, but tell me how many more games from that year had its cultural relevance.
Is Madden 04 destined to be a controversial pick forever? Sure it is. But that doesn't mean it was the wrong one.