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Anyone who played Madden 2004 knows there was basically nothing you could do to stop Michael Vick, who possessed a monster arm and unreal speed that made it virtually impossible to defend the quarterback. Now, the man who was responsible for turning the QB into a veritable cheat code has shed some light on what convinced him to do exactly that.
The virtual version of Vick was basically the Madden equivalent of Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl: a wildly speedy and agile avatar who could literally run rings around defenders who couldn’t even come close to keeping up with the man who’d been given a speed rating of 95 (which was unprecedented for a player at his position at the time, although it’s since been surpassed).
That number obviously wasn’t plucked out of thin air, as anyone who’d seen Vick lead Virginia Tech to the national championship game or watched him pick up where he left off in college after the Falcons selected him with the top overall pick in the 2001 NFL Draft knew the dual-threat QB had basically broken the mold.
ESPN recently connected with Madden “rating czar” Donny Moore for an interview linked to the 20th anniversary of the release of the installment that featured Vick on the cover, and during the conversation, he shed some light on the one NFL game that convinced him the superstar had earned the ratings that resulted in plenty of players introducing a house rule banning the use of the Falcons while facing off against someone else on the couch.
Moore said he saw the light when Atlanta faced off against the Vikings in a Week 13 matchup on December 1, 2002, a contest where Vick passed for 173 yards and racked up the same total on the ground, which included the iconic 46-yard scramble that gave the Falcons the win in overtime.
At that point, “Moore grabbed his pen, reached past his plate of wings and wrote ’95’ next to Vick’s name on his notepad…where he circled the 95 several times and notarized it with a stamp of his fist.” He also provided some insight into his thought process, saying:
“He had NFL defenders going, like, ‘Holy s***’ to themselves, because even they had never seen anything this fast, even they couldn’t realize how fast he was even as he was flying right by them.
He was unstoppable. At that moment, I knew it was crazy but I knew what Vick had to be to reflect real life, to represent that new level of running threat he brought as a guy with wide receiver speed playing quarterback.”
That basically sums it up.