There are a lot of things about modern Madden games that are better than ever, but also a lot that used to be handled more effectively in the past. One such area where the games have taken clear steps back is in what they offer outside of basic football games. While minigames and challenges were once common, they’re far less so today.
One challenge we would love to see worked into upcoming titles that Madden 26 lacks doesn’t come from the brain trust at EA, but instead from a now-discontinued series from a developer more famous for its work on games for the hardcourt.
What Was NFL Quarterback Club Club?
NFL Quarterback Club was a football video game series debuting in the mid-90s and continuing until NFL Quarterback Club 2002 closed out the series. Developed before Electronic Arts had locked down the NFL market in its current monopoly, the QB Club series was the offering from Acclaim, no strangers to popular sports video games. Ultimately, early strong reviews waned, and the series was discontinued.
As the name of the series implies, it began with a focus on quarterbacks and quarterback play. While later editions added more functionality similar to other NFL games of the time, the QB focus remained important, most notably in the inclusion of the Quarterback Challenge mode.
What Was The Quarterback Challenge
The NFL Quarterback Challenge was a real-life annual competition put on by the NFL, which tested NFL quarterbacks in a series of challenges. These were designed to identify and apply tests to the different skills critical to being a successful NFL quarterback. The competition that was most prominent in the 90s became a key gameplay mode for the NFL Quarterback Club series.
In the series, you could participate in the competition, choosing your NFL quarterback and taking on the four challenges against your NFL peers. The four events in the QB Challenge were:
- Speed and Mobility (Rick Mirer, 1995, 7.61 seconds): This event tested a quarterback’s ability to move on the field, a skill that has only gotten more important in the modern game. Quarterbacks must first move through an agility course, which requires them to move in a variety of ways before firing a pass off at a target, which is granted between 0 and .5 seconds removed from time as a bonus based on accuracy. In QB Club, this required players to roll out in the pocket, duck under a hurdle, weave through some static defenders, hop a hurdle, then hit the target while on the run.
- Accuracy (Troy Aikman, 1995, 70 points): The Accuracy challenge was a measure of a quarterback’s ability to deliver accurate balls out of the pocket to moving targets. Quarterbacks were tasked with hitting targets as they moved horizontally and at different depths. In the NFL QB Club 2002 approach to the minigame, the player is responsible for using arrows to target the balls ahead of the moving targets, making it the gamer’s responsibility to accurately judge leads on the passes and land balls in the high-scoring zones when they reach the target.
- Long Distance (Vinny Testaverde, 1988, 80 yards): A pure test of raw throwing power, the long-distance throw was a pure test of how far a quarterback could fire the ball. Quarterbacks were granted the ability to run into their throws, meaning the test served to assess the maximum distance a quarterback could produce under Hail Mary conditions as opposed to traditional targeted throws out of the pocket. Throwers were required to stay behind the fault line after releasing and to land their shots within a designated scoring zone. In the video game version, this test is borrowed from kicking mechanics with a three-click circular meter.
- Read and Recognition (Neil O’Donnell & Brett Favre, 1996 & 1997, 111 points): A test of a quarterback’s ability to identify the right target and then deliver an effective ball, Read and Recognition saw multiple moving targets sent on routes, but only some would have a yellow flag pop-up to show they’re “open” to receive. Quarterbacks each got four turns to identify the eligible targets and complete passes. In NFL QB Club 2002, this combined the standing dummies from the agility course and the throwing ahead of targets from the prior accuracy round.
Mini Games And Modern Madden
Minigame modes may not be common in a lot of modern sports franchises, but there was a time in the sports game world where it was common for titles to drop with fun minigames and modes that let you play around with the mechanics of the engine outside of normal game settings.
Unfortunately, this lessened prioritization means less content for gamers when new editions hit the shelves every year. This may be just another logical byproduct of the move from sports games being things you enjoyed more with friends online than via couch co-op, where minigames and quick modes that allowed for pass-the-controller play were more sought after.
Despite its long absence and the challenge itself also now confined to history, it would be great to see this or a similar mode brought back in future Madden games. As with the historical moments that older Madden games included, which let you relive famous moments and challenge yourself to replicate them or stop them, this is a past joy that is due for another go-round, particularly in a modern game where quarterbacks bring more diverse skillsets to the table, making it interesting to see how each could handle the different modes.
While we wouldn’t recommend holding your breath in hope, with some luck, we may yet see something like this brought back in the future.
