converted. Sega approached Electronic Arts, developer of the Madden NFL series, and president Trip Hawkins, for help, suggesting that he cancel the upcoming Genesis version of Madden in order to work on the game. Hawkins agreed to help Sega but refused to cancel his company's game instead working on both projects. He intentionally made Montana a worse game than Madden, starting with the basic code for the former he removed the 3D field as well as cut down the number of plays from 113 to 100. According to Michael Knox a programmer on the game, most of the deliberate downgrading occurred after the company had already completed the game. Joe Montana Football missed the Christmas deadline and was released in January 1991, shortly after the Genesis version of John Madden Football. Reception Although not as successful as the Madden series, Joe Montana Football and the sequels helped establish the Genesis' reputation as the top platform for sports simulations and proved to Sega Enterprises that sports games could be worthwhile investments. Website Den of Geek would credit both series for helping Sega gain an edge over Nintendo writing " High school and college jocks who would normally be more likely to taunt someone who identified as a video game nerd suddenly found themselves playing for bragging rights on all-night sessions of Madden." Legacy Joe Montana Football was followed by four sequels, all developed by BlueSky Software instead of Electronic Arts: Joe Montana Football II: Sports Talk Football, NFL Sports Talk Football '93, NFL Football '94 Starring Joe Montana, and NFL '95. After the contract with Joe Montana ended in 1995, development on the sixth game in Sega's NFL series moved to Farsight Technologies and the franchise was rebranded as Prime Time NFL Starring Deion Sanders. In 2015, Damon Grow, CEO of Superstar Games, tweeted snippets of Joe Montana Football 16. Joe Montana subsequently released a screenshot of the game. At E3, Damon Grow revealed the game as "Joe Montana Football", a mobile game coming to iOS, followed by Android and PC. References 1990 video games DOS games Electronic Arts games Joe Montana video games North America-exclusive video games Master System games Sega Genesis games Sega video games Video games scored by Russell Lieblich Video games developed in the United States Multiplayer and single-player video games