Under the Microscope: Madden NFL 97

In this edition I’m examining Madden NFL 97:

• I found a cool free camera mode that’s enabled by a special player name.
• And alternate method of unlocking the bonus teams.
• Both special names work for both Saturn and PlayStation.

The free camera name is MADNBUG and the bonus teams name is HISCORE. Read on for details!

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Intro

Madden NFL 97 lets you unlock some bonus teams by entering your name on the User Records screen as TIBURON. This special name has been known for ages — it’s on the very first Wayback Machine snapshot of SegaSages.com for both Saturn and PlayStation.

Tiburon is, of course, the studio that made the game. One of the bonus teams is made of people from their development staff:

You can see the whole group together in the manual:

Are there any other special names? Let’s check…

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More special names

There’s not much reverse engineering needed to figure things out for this game, since the special names are stored in plain text. The game recognizes a total of three:

• Address 06082578 points to the TIBURON name that we know and love.
• Address 06082580 points to a HISCORE name, which I don’t think has been documented before.
• Address 06082160 points to a MADNBUG name. This one is also new.

HISCORE has the same effect as TIBURON — it unlocks the bonus teams:

MADNBUG enables a cool debug camera feature! After you put it in as your name, you can select it from the Options screen under Camera mode:

When you start a game, you’ll have full control over the camera. The D-pad pans across the field, and:

• L and R control the zoom
• A and X control yaw
• B and Y control roll
• C and Z control pitch

Here’s a video of it in action:

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For many more cheat code discoveries, see my archive here at SHIRO!. And for more retro game reverse engineering articles, see my Rings of Saturn blog on Substack.