The cover athlete for the next instalment in the Madden video game series is Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen. Allen is the first player in team history to get this honour. He described it as “a dream from his childhood come true.”
In a revelation on Wednesday, EA Sports made official the Madden 24 cover that has been the subject of rumours for quite some time. However, there is an issue with the cover picture.
Two distinct iterations of the video game’s cover were made available by Madden. A photograph of Allen doing the iconic pre-game posture of gazing down with his hands on his shoulder pads is included with the Standard Edition of the game, which retails for $69.99.
Allen rejoiced with supporters after leaping into the stands in the image included in the Deluxe Edition. For an additional cost of $30, purchasers of this edition will also get early access to the game for three days, 4,600 Madden points, and an “AKA player item.”
When Madden first tweeted a picture of the game’s cover, they used the image from the Deluxe Edition. But if you look closely, you’ll see a mistake.
Take a careful look at the face of Allen. It looks like one of the bars on his facemask has been removed.
This is a peculiar mistake considering that Allen does not normally wear a facemask with a third horizontal bar, which can be seen as partly obscured in the image. He decides to go with only the top and bottom horizontal bars and a little flat piece on the edge.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that EA Sports still needs to submit the photos to the printers. They seem to be aware of the problem since they used an altered version to remove part of Allen’s facemask as their cover picture on Facebook at around 4:30 p.m. They used a performance fixed in the following promotional social media postings.
If a limited number of Madden games are created with the glitch cover, these games may become expensive collectables in the same way that baseball mistake cards have.
But as far as Bills Mafia is concerned, we can only hope that the “Madden Curse” is limited to this technical difficulty.