A video game finally achieves sentience in the second Breaking Madden Super Bowl

By Kyle Daly | January 28, 2015 | 4:37pm

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A video game finally achieves sentience in the second Breaking Madden Super Bowl

Since September 2013, SB Nation’s Jon Bois has made a sport of pushing Madden to its limits, fiddling with in-game player stats until they loosen the game avatars from the bonds of anything that could reasonably be considered football or a video game. The series of articles chronicling this quest is called Breaking Madden, and it just wrapped its second season. Around this time last year, Bois produced the inaugural Breaking Madden Super Bowl, which saw a team of Seahawks populated by seven-foot, 400-pound monsters with all stats maxed out face off against the Broncos, composed entirely of five-foot, 160-pound players with all stats zeroed out. The Seahawks were 366 points up in the first quarter when the game wheezed its last breath and, no lie, replaced all the players on the field with a mutant Seahawk-Bronco hybrid splayed in a lifeless heap of limbs across the 50-yard line. This year, Bois tried the same experiment again.

The result is as funny and bizarrely poignant as the rest of Breaking Madden. This time around, it’s a team of inept, micro-Seahawks against Monstar-scale Patriots, and Bois takes us through a three-game “run” (football term) to the “end zone” (football term) that, incredibly, sees Madden seemingly gain sentience and try to put itself out of its own misery several times. Along the way, Bois also hits on a possible loophole that in theory would allow a football team to rack up infinite points in a never-ending mockery of a game. For much more, including the thrilling conclusion, read on at the source.