The cover's reveal was a few days madden coins ago. the Undefeated's Aaron Dodson caught up with Jackson to talk about his Tecmo Bowl days, how Bo Knows came to life as well as his Madden return, and much more.
Edited for the clarity of it and its length.
What does it mean for you to finally become a cover athlete for the game, 35 years after you started your career?
The idea has been in development for a long time. The timing had to be just right for my brand. It was working with the Madden people to smooth things out, complete all the i's dot all the t'sonce we were done, everything else was simply going for it. I thought that somewhere in my past I'd done the right thing so that I could be seen as one of the iconic athletes from over three decades ago. Madden believes in me to do things like this.
Your legacy in video games dates back to 1989, when you were the mainstay of Tecmo Bowl. How was it to experience yourself as a virtual person back then?
I can still picture myself there in cheap mut coins Tecmo Bowl. I still have my video games. I've got the machine to play it on. It's just in a box someplace in the storage. It's iconic. It makes me happy knowing that I have grown-ups in their 40s who say"Hey, my friend and I got into the most intense battle of our lives because we all wanted to be in Tecmo Bowl when we were young. So our parents took the game, and my dad put it in his tool cabinet. We couldn't play with it for about a month as the fight was so intense.' I hear that frequently. If I'm at the sports memorabilia exhibitions, there are people who come up with that video game. They'll say, "I've had the machine to play it on. My kids play it. My grandkids also play it ... too. And everyone continues to debate who is going to become Bo Jackson.' Tecmo Bowl ... that was a lot of technology in the past. When you look at it today and think, 'Wow it's an old-fashioned.'