Madden creative director Ian Cummings sat down for a chat with Jon Robinson from ESPN.com to talk about Madden 12, specifically the addition of “surprise” onside kicks. Onside kicks have been in football video games for a long time. Originally they were pointless because you could never recover. Then they finally gave you the ability to target a specific spot on the ball to give it a different sort of bounce. Still, they don’t work very often. Part of that has always likely been to prevent users from taking advantage of it when playing other people online, but who knows.

The biggest issue I always had with onside kicks was that the CPU always called the onside recover. No matter what they would be ready or they would audible and you would have to wait for them to audible before you could kick. There was never an element of surprise.

So the concept of the surprise onside kick is a cool idea. I haven’t played much Madden the last couple of years, despite the fact that I keep buying it. I am more of an NCAA Football kind of guy.