Madden NFL 10 was the first game in the series to feature two players on its cover.
Released in 2009, Madden NFL 10 broke with the franchise’s traditional single-athlete cover format. It featured Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu and Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald, who had faced each other in Super Bowl XLIII the previous season. Their matchup provided a natural theme for the joint cover.
The game was the twentieth installment in the Madden series and appeared on PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Wii, Xbox 360, and BlackBerry, with an iOS version following in September. The Wii cover also showed additional Cardinals players in the background, but the principal cover athletes were still Polamalu and Fitzgerald.
The two-player design is sometimes confused with later editions that used alternate covers or special editions. Madden NFL 10’s distinction is specifically that it was the first Madden title whose main cover featured two players. Polamalu later became associated with the so-called Madden Curse after suffering a knee injury early in the season.