New Announcer/Stadium Sounds Give Madden 11 Life

One of the big improvements in Madden NFL 10 was its presentation – unless you're talking about play-by-play announcer Tom Hammond. Unlike sidekick and color analyst Chris Collinsworth, Hammond sucked life out of the game with his robotic delivery. For Madden NFL 11, the developers at EA Tiburon are turning to a new play-by-play voice as the centerpiece in a full audio makeover.

In Madden NFL 11, play-by-play duties are handled by Gus Johnson, the lively broadcaster who works college basketball and NFL games for CBS and served as an announcer in EA's NCAA College Basketball 10. Known for his over the top playcalls, Johnson brings a much more dramatic style to Madden 11. "I was campaigning to get rid of Hammond before we shipped [Madden NFL 10], and really pushing on it," remembers Madden NFL 11 creative director Ian Cummings. Funnily enough, before Hammond signed on with the series a few years ago, the NFL had suggested Johnson. For whatever reason it never happened.

EA Tiburon isn't just adding more excitement with the addition of Johnson (see examples in the YouTube clips below), it is also adding more play-by-play in general. Previous Madden games only had audio for the snap, throw, catch, and then nothing until the player hit the endzone. "There's like four or five layers now," Cummings says, "snap, breaking through the line, making a move through the d-backs, open field..." The team wants to have more emotion come through and less of a dry, radio-style play-by-play. To help the process EA hired two writers to punch up the commentary.

Making good on a promise that EA Tiburon and Cummings himself mentioned on a blog last year, for Madden 11 the developer is also redoing crowd noise and including more custom team chants and stadium songs. Whereas in past years the team had about 50 people shout their lungs out in the parking garage next door to the EA Tiburon offices and then add layer upon layer of reverb to fill it out, this year they've re-recorded things like the "J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets!" celebration and added more variety in the pitch and cadence of the voices to more accurately replicate a crowd of different people. Furthermore, this year's Madden features more famous team-specific chants, such as the Vikings' "Skol Vikings!" song that plays after a score, the Redskins' "Hail to the Redskins," and the Eagles' "Fly Eagles Fly."

Stadiums are given further life via the licensing of such famous stadium songs like AC/DC's "Thunderstruck,"  Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train," Blur's "Song 2," Garry Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part 2," Bush's "Machinehead," Todd Rungren's "Bang the Drum All Day," and Zombie Nation's "Kernkraft 400 (sport chant stadium remix)," among others.

To get a sense of how Gus Johnson will change the play-by-play in Madden, check out these YouTube videos:

New Madden announcer Gus Johnson details a Chris Johnson TD:

Gus Johnson goes nuts during Brandon Stokley's last-minute heroics in week one:

Here's a clip of the Minnesota Vikings' fight song, which is one of the team-specific audio clips in Madden NFL 11