By Paul Honda
hondareport@aol.com
Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2006

It would've been a first, really, had I the courage.

Then again, how stupidly preposterous would anyone really be to do the unthinkable: form a 12-step support group for Madden football game addicts? Heck, it's not just playing the video game that's addictive. Let me take you back to 2002, when the game truly sent EA Sports, a.k.a. Electronic Arts, through the roof.

The company, the stock, the everything that looked, smelled and tasted like Madden went off, a blazing comet through the galaxy. Absolutely unstoppable. Why?

Football fans, and I do mean fanatics, finally had a toy that truly began to capture the nuances and beautiful bludgeonesque grit and thrill of the game. John Elway's Quarterback (arcade game) went in that direction back in 1985, so not like those unbelievably primitive electronic football games we had as kids. (Damn, unwrapping that game on Christmas morning, laying out the field and cardboard bleachers with fans, lining up those plastic football players, and most importantly, the hummm ... who knew it could get better?

John Elway's Quarterback, though, took football light years into the future. During those marathon stints at dark, dismal, dusty and now long-gone Kaimuki Cue, the addiction really took root. One night, I played that game for hours on end, the only person in the arcade. By the time I was done stuffing the change machine with dollar bills, 5-dollar bills and all, I'd spent way more than I'd planned. When I left, it was 4:30 a.m. I was in a daze. My Dodge Swinger sat there in an empty parking lot, cold and rusty, wondering what the hell it was doing there.

That Swinger, my cranky, baby blue $200 special, wasn't there for the last time. It took awhile for my John Elway Football addiction to wane. The hunger for a competent football game ebbed, and remained dormant for 17 years. That's when I finally relented and tried Madden for the first time. Within a few days, I was playing for hours into the night. Not long after that, I got myself an adapter for the PS2, a miniscule $45 for the power to connect to the globe.

No longer would I have to settle for Madden League games with co-workers and interns at the office I worked at. (That's another column waiting to be spewed.) If I wanted a high-competition game at 4 a.m., a flick of the PS2 and I'd be off to the cyberwars that Madden football really is online. Work hard, play harder. For some folks, that means drinking up or sucking on a big bong.

For me, it meant logging into the Madden site online through the PS2 and getting the game on. I didn't want a cure. I wanted to play. So I did. On days off, I'd log in at 9 a.m., play game after game, with breaks only to pee, drink water and, if if it was around, have a snack. By 11 p.m. or so, I'd realize that I hadn't seen the sun all day, my B.O. was reeking, and that I hadn't dressed at all.

A normal wife would kick a man like that to the curb, but she wouldn't realize that he would drag the PS2 and controller with him to the street, find an empathetic pal, and log in at his house for the night.

That's how bad it was. I never had to resort to those desperate measures. Well, never had to deal with a wife, normal or otherwise, who would toss me and my Madden.

So, after glorious days and nights playing online, playing the fellow Maddenholics at work (yes, after hours, in the conference room on the big, big TV), I kept playing, but the thrill began to leave. See, online, people figured out ways to hack the game, to cheat, really. That was annoying and it got worse over time. After all, a game online is usually an hour long. To beat someone and then have that win dissipate because the guy is a poor sport and "glitches" the system to screw you out of a win ... that got old after awhile.

The Madden League we had in the office, well, that became a thing of the past when I left the company. Gone were the great rivalries, the tumultuous battles, the replays, Associated Press-style game stories, even photos off the TV screen that we published in our ridiculously good league newsletter.

Three years have passed since I've played a Madden game online. I can't say I miss the foolishness of it all. I will say that I never resorted to the awful world of participating in pay-to-play tournaments, the kind that are held at a friend's house and lead to a scrap after a controversial finish. Not that playing for money is purely evil, but I got more than enough excitement just from beating friends. Or losing to them.

But today, the new Madden is released. Yeah, there's the curse. Shawn Alexander of the Seahawks is doomed, right? I don't really care, at least unless he ends up on my fantasy team.

That's another addiction for millions of fools, and though I love fantasy football and basketball, I'm not quite at that level yet.

I know the Madden addiction is history. Why? I was introduced to NCAA Football, the video game, in '03, and playing with Hawaii was a real drug to me. I began playing that online, too, sticking with the Warriors and playing only other 'B' level teams. (Akron can be a mean team to face if your secondary sucks.)

So, I had plenty of action playing NCAA Football online, too, but that gets old, as well. In fact, the year after Tim Chang and Chad Owens graduated, I had no interest in the game. Not having a deep threat takes a lot of the fun away, and it's not easy to play ball-control with UH's offense. (You can always adopt another team's playbook, but I just don't do it with Hawaii.)

So I haven't played NCAA online in around 3 years. I'm so out of touch that when my nephew played Madden with me a few months ago, I didn't know what to do with the new "Quarterback Vision" tool. It's a little intimidating, to be frank. Not losing to my nephew, but rather, grasping and using the technology. It takes time. Repetition. I have little room for this.

And still, some of us have a Madden League in the works. No, I wasn't one of those crazy fools who did the ESPN pay-per-view for pointers for Madden 2007. Besides, I have yet to dig that trusty PS2 out of these dusty boxes since I moved house last spring. The motivation to relearn the game is returning, if only because I refuse to be embarrassed by the same guys I used to beat (and lose to) in that 2003 Madden League.

We're all a bit older and wiser, settled into our lives and jobs, but still looking for that rush that comes when your quarterback delivers a perfect play-action strike to a wide receiver on a Z route. If I get to be decent again, the only real score I have to settle is with Darnell Arceneaux.

I never beat the guy, not in two tries. I was fairly close, but you would not believe how good he plays with a fast safety. Not that he ever played the position at Saint Louis or Utah, or even with the Hawaiian Islanders. But the yearning for revenge is there. Is that a sad thing? Perhaps.

It would be pissy of me to blame John Elway and modern technology for an addiction that cost me hundreds of quarters back in the '80s. And it would be ludicrous of me to whine about John Madden's Empire of Hypnotic Football for the Masses. After all, the game has brought me immeasurable joy, and the cost of one game ($49) is a bargain compared to the bucks I used to drop in arcades for John Elway Quarterback, Punch-Out and even Sprint (circa 1979, Fun Factory Pearlridge).

I better start working out my thumbs. And if I don't, maybe starting that 12-step Maddenholics group is my real calling.

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