The real reason that I founded Electronic Arts was because I wanted to make computerized versions of games like Strat-O-Matic.

— Trip Hawkins[2]

Trip Hawkins created a clone of the Strat-O-Matic paper and dice-based football simulation game as a teenager. The game was unsuccessful due to its complexity, and he hoped to one day delegate its rules to a computer. At Harvard College, where Hawkins played football for the Crimson, he wrote a football simulation for the PDP-11 minicomputer which, he later said, predicted that the Miami Dolphins would defeat the Minnesota Vikings 23–6 (actually 24–7) in the 1974 Super Bowl.[3][4] After founding Electronic Arts in 1982[3]—"The real reason that I founded [it] was because I wanted to make computerized versions of games like Strat-O-Matic", Hawkins later said[2][5]—the company began designing a microcomputer football game. Hawkins first approached his favorite player Joe Montana to endorse the proposed game but the quarterback already had an endorsement deal with Atari, Inc., and his second choice, Cal coach Joe Kapp, demanded up front royalties far in excess of what Hawkins was willing to pay.[3]

In 1984, Hawkins approached Madden. He and game producer Joe Ybarra arranged a follow-up meeting with the broadcaster during an Amtrak train trip over two days because of Madden's fear of flying.[3][6][7][8] The EA executives promised that the proposed game would be a sophisticated football simulation and they asked the retired Oakland Raiders coach for his endorsement and expertise. Madden knew nothing about computers beyond his telestrator but agreed; he had taught a class at the University of California, Berkeley, called "Football for Fans", and envisioned the program as a tool for teaching and testing plays.[3][9][10] (Madden would continue to see the game as an educational tool. When asked in 2012 to describe Madden NFL, he called it "a way for people to learn the game and participate in the game at a pretty sophisticated level".[8]) Hawkins and Ybarra during the train trip learned football plays and strategies from Madden from sunrise to midnight.[3]

EA likely expected Madden to endorse the game without participating in its design. Early plans envisioned six or seven players per team because of technical limitations but Madden insisted on having 11 players,[3][8] stating "I'm not putting my name on it if it's not real".[7][10] Ybarra, who had played chess, not football, in high school, became an expert on the subject through his work, but found that 11 players overwhelmed contemporary home computers. Most projects that are as delayed as Madden are canceled; Ybarra and developer Robin Antonick needed three years, more than twice the length of the average development process. The project became known within the company as "Trip's Folly", and Madden—who had received $100,000 advance against royalties that EA's outside auditors advised to write-off because it would never be recouped—believed at times that EA had given up.[3][10]

The company hired Bethesda Softworks to finish the game, but this only got them partway to their goal. While EA used many of its designs, including contributions to their physics engine,[11] within a year Bethesda stopped working on Madden and sued EA over EA's failure to publish new versions of Bethesda's Gridiron! football game. This added to the delay.[7] After a final development push, John Madden Football debuted in 1988 for the Apple II computers. Hawkins and an exhausted Ybarra ("All my memories are of pain") could move on to other projects.[3]

Contracted to provide plays,[10] Madden gave EA the 1980 Raiders playbook, and EA hired San Francisco Examiner writer Frank Cooney, who had designed his own figurine football game with numerical skill ratings. Those skill ratings, also utilized in a spreadsheet based game called Grid Grade, were a precursor to player ratings in Madden Football. Although the company could not yet legally use NFL teams' or players' names, Cooney obtained real plays from NFL teams.[3] The back of the box called the game "The First Real Football Simulation" and quoted Madden: "Hey, if there aren't 11 players, it isn't real football." Documentation included diagrams of dozens of offensive and defensive plays with Madden's commentary on coaching strategies and philosophy.[12] In addition to submitting plays, Cooney worked with programmers and producers to create numerical ratings for every player so they would perform appropriately in the game, especially in man-to-man situations. In the beginning there were eight to 12 traits that were graded for each player. That number would grow to more than 200 as the game became more sophisticated. The game sold moderately well[3] but given the sophisticated playbook its interface was complex, and Madden's insistence on 11 players caused the game to run slowly.[7]

During this period, Madden turned down the opportunity to buy an "unlimited" number of options for EA stock in its initial public offering, a decision he later called "the dumbest thing I ever did in my life".