By Shannon McMahon

Today’s football players have an edge that no athletes before them have possessed: They’ve played more football than any cohort in history. Even with the rise of year-round training, full-contact practice time on the field hasn’t increased — in fact, it has actually gone down, as coaches have tried to limit the physical punishment that the game exacts. But videogames, especially the ubiquitous Madden NFL, now allow athletes of all ages to extend their training beyond their bodies.

Wired Magazine reports that this revolution has sneaked up on many athletes, coaches, and fans. Sports and videogames — a combination that was one of the first diplomatic efforts in the emerging worldwide jock-geek armistice — have been interconnected since October 1958, when William Higinbotham, a nuclear physicist at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, hooked up Tennis for Two, an electronic game of virtual tennis that is widely regarded as the first videogame. The first home videogame console, Magnavox’s Odyssey, included a digital version of table tennis, and then there was Atari’s Pong. The genre quickly expanded to baseball, basketball, football, auto racing, track and field, boxing, soccer, martial arts — if two or more people competed in something in the flesh, pretty soon they could compete in a digital version.

Of all these games, John Madden Football — first published by Electronic Arts for the Apple II in 1989 and for the Sega Genesis console in 1990 — was perhaps the most committed to simulating its sport in all its complexity, including, for the first time, 11 players on each side. (”Most of my friends would tell you I started EA as an excuse to make a football game,” company founder Trip Hawkins says. “And there’s probably a fair amount of truth to that.”) Madden and its sequels became the most commercially successful sports videogame ever produced. (That success was cemented in 2004 by an exclusive license with the NFL that eliminated direct competitors.) In 2008, Madden NFL sold more copies than any other title except Wii Play, according to the research firm NPD Group, making EA an estimated $263 million. While John Madden’s career as an excitable TV commentator and analyst made him famous, theMadden videogame franchise — the Gospel of Coach John, available everywhere for $60 — has exerted a larger influence on football, from Pop Warner to the pros.

By training on these games, researchers found, nongamers can achieve faster reaction time, improved hand-eye coordination, and greatly increased ability to process multiple stimuli. Studies have demonstrated that military pilots and laparoscopic surgeons can improve their professional skills by playing videogames. It’s not much of a leap to think that athletes could, too.

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