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It’s Super Bowl weekend! Time for some FOOTBALL! EA is pumped and all set to get you geared up and psyched for another fun year with Madden NFL. Only, 2013 is no ordinary year for the series.

With all the talk of Mega Man, Metal Gear, Street Fighter,Final Fantasy and all of our favorite classic gaming series turning a quarter of a decade this past year, we forgot another long running franchise which never gets the same amount of love. Yes, Madden NFL is turning 25 years old in 2013, and you just know EA is going to capitalize on this.

It’s true, most gamers love to scoff at Madden NFL for its uneven annual releases. Some years it completely renovates its gameplay, physics, animations and graphics. Other years, it feels exactly like the same game you played a year earlier with not much more than a roster change.

Of course any gamer who claims Madden NFL has never changed needs to stop and think about that statement. When it first launched on the SEGA Genesis in 1988, it was a 16-bit sports game with a sprite based graphic design. It survived the leap into 3D when moving to the PlayStation, and survived two subsequent console generation changes as well, knocking off stiff competition from Midway’s NFL Blitz, 989 Studio’s horrible stint NFL GameDay, Microsoft’s NFL Fever and the most popular of the bunch, the amazing NFL 2K series.

Like it or not, no one can deny that Madden NFL has been just as much of a staple in gaming as most of our other favorite franchises. To ignore all it has achieved and all of the hurdles it has cleared would be the same as denying every other series that hit the 25 year mark. It has evolved, changed, and yet still kept itself familiar the same way Zelda, Mario, Metal Gear, and Castlevania have done over the years, and I say good for it.

EA promises more to come. The teaser image hints at the date August 27th, 2013, most likely aiming towards Madden NFL‘s typical pre-season release.