John Madden takes questions from readers in the latest issue of Time magazine. He answers a handful of questions related to the games.

Do you believe in the Madden NFL cover curse? —Martin Bennett, Mount Airy, GA.
No, and I don’t think players believe in it either. If you go back to the history of the Madden game, I was probably on the cover of it half the time. So if I was to believe there was a curse, I would also have to believe I’d been cursed. And I’ve never had that feeling.

Are you good at Madden NFL? —Brian Harrington, Orting, Wash.
No, no. Too old. I have the game on my bus, and I horse around with it, but I get more out of it by watching other people play.

Twenty years ago did you think for a moment that the video game would have the success that it had? — Farrel Allan, New York City
No and not only did I not think that, nobody else thought that. We didn’t know what we were doing video-game wise because there weren’t any video games when we started 20 years ago. And it started as a computer game. And it was going to be part teaching tool, part computer game.

And then all these video games came around and different hardware and we were the first game so we adjusted and adapted to it, but to say that we knew that this was going to be or that we were ahead. We didn’t know. We just started at a time and happened to be the first one that started.

What was it about this game that helped you decide you wanted to be apart of it? — Matthew Donelan, Seattle
The first part of it was I wanted 11 guys on offense and 11 guys on defense. Now 20 some years later that sounds simple—yeah, it’s football—but everything up till then had three or four guys. So that took three years to develop—to get 11 on 11.

So that was the most important part. When I knew that we could get 11 guys on offense and 11 guys on defense then we could play a game. We could do everything in the video game that is done in the regular game. But until we could get to that we couldn’t do it. So it took three years just to get there.

What do you think the Madden football game has brought to the game of football—to fans or even to players? — Oliver Beqaj, Los Angeles
I think it’s brought a new way to learn the game to fans and to players. They’re the same people. When you think that we’ve been doing this for 20 years and guys that are playing now in the NFL, they started playing Madden in grammar school, and then they played in high school, then they played in college, and now they play in the NFL and they’re part of the game.

I think there was a generation years ago when I was growing up where you would learn the game by going out into an empty yard and playing. Now I think this is a way they learn the game—they learn the game through video games.

It’s a good thing, because that’s today. The things we could do when I was a kid or even why my kids were kids, you can’t do today. It’s easy to say “Oh heck, yeah I remember, I used to walk two miles, both of them uphill to go play and we’d play out on a field and the guys would come.” Well, you couldn’t do that today. I think people who say that’s the way it used to be—well it did used to be, but it’s not that way anymore and this is the way young people learn today.

Who’s the best team in the 09 version? Who do you recommend suiting up with? Well you’re always going to get the best from the best teams. I think it’s fun to play as the New England Patriots and as the Indianapolis Colts. You know that’s the way you can spread it out and change and be a great quarterback. You can air it out a lot. You can air it out a lot more. You don’t even worry about running.

Thanks to Stiles Points