THE GAME.

For this game, I played exclusively as the Seahawks. None of the things the Broncos will do below are on account of me. Those are all the computer's fault.

First, let's check in on Mom. I love her more than I can say, but she is terrible at football.

Among her many other superlatives, she's the most generous, giving person I've ever known. Her presence here is only one of a thousand different times she's gone out of her way to help others in need, in ways big and small. I remember one of those small times. I was walking home from my last day of fourth grade, and as I neared my front door, a water balloon landed on the ground a few feet away from me. I looked up. She'd missed me on purpose, and she was smiling. On the porch she had a giant bucket of water balloons she'd filled for me, just waiting for me to get home and play and say hello to the summer. It was probably the 2,000th-nicest thing she's ever done for me, and I don't know what makes that one stick out, but I felt love, and it mattered. Anyway, here's a GIF of her getting clobbered.

She never really had more than one second to get rid of the ball. Her blockers were as inept as they possibly could have been, and she fumbled on roughly every other passing attempt. She did manage to complete one pass: I decided it would be fun to run "punt block" on a first down. Mom simply chucked it to a receiver, who found himself completely unguarded and waddled for a 30-yard gain. It was the Broncos' only positive-yardage play I saw.

If you're new to Breaking Madden, I should explain something to you: the game hates me. HATES me. Madden doesn't appreciate all the things I've put it through, and if a machine can emote, it's this one. It's desperate, and it's angry.

That's the only explanation I have for this. The Peyton Manning Broncos have no designed quarterback runs in their Madden playbook, which makes sense, because Manning tucks and runs once every 25 years or so. Doesn't matter. The computer sent my mom to rush with the ball.

"You're being terribly mean," the computer told me through this moment. "I can also be mean."

These Broncos were stone-cold stupid. Madden's Awareness rating, as demonstrated by previous installments of this series, is one of the very most potent skill categories. Without it, normally competent players are reduced to total knuckleheads who often don't know what they're doing, what they're supposed to be doing, where the ball is, or whether they're playing a sport at all.

The Broncos' kick returner, Big Walrus, was so completely checked out that I was able to kick the ball and hit him in the ass.

That was not an isolated incident. There were lots and lots of kickoffs in this game, naturally, since I was scoring all the time. When I kicked them the ball, they kinda just stood there. AND THE BALL KEPT HITTING THEM IN THEIR ASSES.

Macca really drives the point home by dancing a little jig en route to the most comically miserable safety I've ever seen. Goodness, these Broncos are not particularly good. They may lose by a score of 28-0, or perhaps even greater!

There is no football explanation for this:

I called a Hail Mary, because the Broncos were offering absolutely no incentive to call anything more complicated than, "RUN TO SCORE PLACE THROW BALL SCORE." Even if Mr. Drebot had played man coverage, his guy would have left him in the dust, so playing zone was really no better or worse. I guarantee you, though, that Drebot's assigned zone was not way over on the opposite side of the field. He looks back at the receiver out of apparent cursory interest, then returns to his very important job of speed-sidestepping to a part of the field where there is no football and there are no sports of any kind.

These Broncos really whipped themselves up into a clueless frenzy over all these Seahawks running around. I thought it might be nice to settling everyone down a little, so I had my running back, VISHNU, just stand still and chill in the backfield for a little while.

Morgan C. is but the red shell revolving around Bowser's kart. It's like watching one of those really awkward musical numbers in which someone sings to someone else, and that person just has to sit there and be sung at and stared at and do nothing.

In the player creator, Madden asked me to choose whether or not each player had a "high motor." I decided that, no, the Broncos do not. I'm still a little unclear on what exactly that means, but it might help to explain this.

I think this play, in which two of my receivers slammed into each other, was the Seahawks' only incompletion of the game, and I'm glad dude could get a good view of the spectacle. He might have had a better view, had he taken literally one step in any direction over the course of the entire play. The folks in orange were just completely giving up.

Guy's finally got himself a Seahawk, and his friends are offering absolutely no help. This isn't Madden 2001 or something. There's an engine in place that draws up a limitless number of ways in which a guy can get gang-tackled. Defenders can and do bum-rush a ball carrier in groups of six or seven. This is not a limit of the physics engine or anything else on the technical end. His teammates just wanted to stand there and watch, that's all.

The Broncos can't be blamed all that much, I guess, because terrible things tended to happen when they interacted with the other team.

That GIF goes from good to great once you watch the player in the background. He kind of ambles right into his own tackle, but not before rubbernecking at the misfortune of his friends. Hey, I don't really know where to put this, so it's just going to go here: the Broncos' uniforms are the ugliest in football by a considerable margin. The orange and blue don't work together at all, the logo screams "create-a-team default," and the numbers look like they were ripped off the Rocketeer's mailbox. Also, the dark-blue sides make y'all look like you're wearing sandwich boards. Wear nicer things to the video game!

I set the Broncos such that they were as injury-prone as possible. Their roster of able bodies started to thin out pretty quickly.

Torn MCL, broken jaw, broken foot, broken hand. Broken all over. About 10 minutes into the game, the Broncos had eight players listed on the injury report, all of whom were ruled out for the rest of the game. Eight, it turns out, was the maximum number the game would allow. After that, there were still injury timeouts being called all over the place, but no matter how devastating the hit, Madden wouldn't take them off the field.

"They've got him. Pull up the rope. There's nothing we can do for him now."

Before long, I could only get tackled if I tried to. My Seahawks barely had to do anything but run in a beeline to the end zone if they wanted to score. The Broncos fumbled away the ball on nearly every play.

I had reached the mathematical ceiling of how often I could score. I wouldn't blame you if you didn't believe me, so here's a screenshot.

About 10 minutes into the game, I had scored 262 points. The above score is actually wrong. We've run into this problem before: once you get to 255 points, Madden stops counting correctly. Not that it doesn't try.

At the bottom, it says the Seahawks have scored 255 points. At the top, 266. Neither was correct, and I was pretty amused that a computer could attempt the most basic of tasks -- addition -- and come up with two kinds of wrong.

Since the game stopped counting, I simply started counting myself. I started to become more and more efficient at forcing fumbles, and angling my kicks so that I could get the best angles on the return man. Scoring was nearly effortless, and nothing could stop me.

With just under two minutes left in the first quarter, I was winning 366 to zero. I realized that I was on pace to score 1,500 points in a single game. I had never conceived of such a high score. I'd never even heard anyone talk idly about such a thing. There was absolutely nothing the Broncos could do to slow down my pace. I could score just as surely as someone can point and click. It was great. I wanted to ruin Madden in a way I never had before, and I was doing it.

And then it happened. Before I tell you what happened next, I want to lay out a couple of things: first, I made no actual hacks to this game. I didn't have some special jailbroken Xbox, nor a special copy of Madden, nor anything like that. I bought my Xbox at Target and bought my copy of Madden off Amazon, and that's that. Second, I stake whatever journalistic integrity I have upon the statement that I didn't Photoshop any of this, and that it happened just as I say it did.

I was setting up for a two-point conversion try, which I hadn't failed all game. Suddenly, an official blew a whistle and called one of my players for a false start.

Wait a minute. I turned all the penalties off. I had certainly turned off the "false start" penalty, as well as every other penalty. This was the first time a ref had shown up all game.

I wondered what the Hell had happened, so I went to the replay.

This was no replay. There were no players on the field. I scanned up and down, and my eyes caught a little speck of something at midfield.

It was placed neatly at the 50-yard line, right in the middle of the NFL logo.

I panned the camera over and zoomed in. And I stared and stared, and then I got Spencer on the line.

Jon Bois: dude

so i'm simulating the game. there's a funny moment, so i go to look at the replay

nobody's there. the field's empty. so i look around, and then i notice there's this thing, neatly placed in the middle of the NFL logo

so then i zoom in.

Jon Bois: it's like this half-Bronco, half-Seahawk fetus

the game has told me in the only language it has left that it has been broken

Spencer Hall: you made that Jon

you took science

and made an abomination

you did that

Jon Bois: i'm a dad

hand me a cigar

Spencer Hall: [puts it out in that thing's eye]

eye hole

whatever it has

It ... this thing ... it had Seahawks lettering, and yet it had Broncos orange around its "head." It didn't appear to have legs. It appeared to have four arms. There was no rewinding or fast-forwarding in this replay, because there was no time. It was just a giant, still image to explore.

Right in the middle of the field. The computer had left it there for me to see. What did it mean? Had the computer descended into visual gibberish, or was it speaking, fluently and concisely, in a language I could never understand?

I continued to stare at it. This was not a gesture of a being who was having a good time or approved of what I was doing. This was an expression of resignation, of sadness, of delirium.

I could not continue. My heart wouldn't let me. I used the simulation feature to speed up the game to the end. I relinquished my ambitions of a 1,500-point game. Seahawks 255, Broncos 0. The machine and I agreed upon the final score.

And the season was over, and the machine bled to death.