‘Madden’ should bring back Rushing Attack, the best thing it ever made

For some reason, Rushing Attack was only on Madden for a few years and then it disappeared.

This week, we’re celebrating some of our favorite random plays and obscure moments in NFL history — those that WE will never forget, even if others have. Welcome to “Who Remembers?” Week at SB Nation NFL.

Football video games can be a little inaccessible sometimes. Firing up a game of Madden isn’t exactly like a simple game of Pac-Man. If you don’t know the rules of football, don’t understand the strategy of calling plays, or just don’t feel much like getting invested in a game that’ll probably take more than a half hour to finish, Madden might not be for you.

Madden’s Rushing Attack mini-game was the exception.

The idea was pretty simple: A player is given control of a running back who has a fullback and a few blocking dummies to follow. All that’s standing between the rusher and a touchdown are two to four defenders, depending on the difficulty setting. Like so:

After scoring as many points as possible in a minute, you switch sides and take over the defense for another minute.

It was perfect.

Here’s what it looked like, via a YouTube user as enthusiastic about Rushing Attack as I am:

“This game was for everybody,” MilesDawkins247 says in the video. “It was for the people that weren’t that good at Madden. It was for the person who was a seasoned veteran at Madden. It was for the person who was kinda good, but it didn’t take it too seriously.”

Yep, that pretty much sums it up.

My brother and I could play Rushing Attack for hours. If one of us won in a blowout, that was fine because it only took a couple minutes to finish and get a fresh chance at revenge.

The game was first introduced in Madden 2005, but — for whatever reason — it eventually disappeared. Game features are added and removed by EA, seemingly at random, and plenty of people were sad to see Rushing Attack go:

Madden is always going to live or die by how fun the actual, ya know, football game part of the game is to play. But it can’t be that hard to give us the super fun, bite-sized version. It’s been a long time since I gave Madden — or any video game — much of my attention. I’d love the chance to play an updated version of Rushing Attack.

So please, Madden: Bring it back.