EA have sent over a Press Release announcing that
Madden 09 has "gone gold". What does this mean? Well traditionally it means that the game is ready to ship. In this case it is simply an excuse for EA to build some additional hype around the game. Given EA's tight development schedule and its planned ship date of early August, the game would currently be sitting with first party developers (Microsoft and Sony) as their internal test teams do their best to find as many compliance issues as possible. Its not ready to ship yet, but unless MS or Sony tell EA they must fix a bug, nothing else will be touched. The good news however is that the EA Producers have already made it clear that they
want to patch the game sooner rather than later.
EA also sent over some new
Madden 09 screenshots and some
videos.