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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

There's this odd little rumor/story that gets passed around from time to time that Madden, deep down in the core of its object code, is still running the SNES game engine from the 1990s.

From a blog somewhere else:

"Madden 2015 has a long, dark history. Inside its inmost code, there's a tiny copy of snes9x, linked to a tiny virtual display, used only in memory, never shown to the user. This arrangement has been used to drive every version of Madden since John Madden Football 97, although the emulator then was a custom job written (poorly) by EA."

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I worked on Madden for several years. It would be delightful and hilarious if that were true.

There is some very old code in there, or at least was when I was on it. I recall digging up the code that updated your score on a touchdown—not a bit of logic that has much need to change—and saw Steve Chiang's initials on it, from back when he still coded.

One obvious sign is that it's a fake is that there's no way there would be a shitty emulator in Madden. Icer Addis, the creator of Nesticle, worked on Madden for years and wouldn't have tolerated that. If there was an emulator, it would be a good one.

Answer me this: why does the opponent wait until 2 minutes left in the game to do an onsides kick and then they will do it even if I'm ahead by 6 touchdowns?

Some further digging actually sent me back here (via a "Breaking Madden" article linked from a Metafilter discussion)[0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7159513

If only there was a tiny copy of an NES emulator running Tecmo Super Bowl in there instead.

Can pretty well confirm this isn't true; 97 for PSX etc was a fresh rewrite in C++.

I tracked that quote down to a MetaFilter post, and it seemed to be intended as a joke about a modern Madden game using antiquated coding techniques: http://www.metafilter.com/142452/Breaking-Madden-2-Break-Har...

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