The Slatest

The Internet’s Best Surreal Video-Game Football Fiction Serial is Back for Another Season

From Breaking Madden.

SB Nation

Jon Bois is a staffer at SB Nation, an entity that operates 300-ish team-specific, fan-oriented sports sites and maintains a home page at SBNation.com. Bois is one of the most entertaining writers on the Internet, combining humor, fiction, and new media in sui generis fashion. He recently published a 44,000-word alternate-universe history of Tim Tebow’s Canadian football career, for example. (In our universe, Tim Tebow has never played Canadian football.) One of Bois’s most well-known creations is Breaking Madden, a series of dispatches about playing EA Sports’ Madden football video games using, like, really bizarre custom settings. Seeing what happens when a team of 800-pound freaks confronts a team of tiny players who’ve all been given the name “Miniature Football Person McGee,” that sort of thing. It sounds like a one-note joke, but it turns out that watching impossible situations play out in sophisticated virtual reality is actually endlessly hilarious/fascinating/weird. And ominous: It’s a programmed sci-fi dystopia. Some unpredictable stuff happens. For now, we can still shut off the XBox when things go haywire. But only for now. Watch your back, is all I’m saying.

Anyway, Breaking Madden is back, and in this entry, Bois contrives to allow rookie Jadeveon Clowney to set the NFL’s all-time career sack record in his “first game.” This happens:

SB Nation

That’s a 3-foot-tall-ish computer player comforting Washington’s Robert Griffin III as Jadeveon Clowney dances. Click through and enjoy the whole piece!