Tremendous Johnson's Long Hard Road To Madden

Anyone can succeed with the NFL's actual superstars in Madden 11, but there's a certain joy in finding fictional prospects from franchise mode...Wait, is that guy's name really Tremendous Johnson? Time to investigate.

Reader Andrew sent along this shot, and promised that he's "100% drafting him no matter how good or bad he ends up being."

He might not have the ideal body type to be a free safety, but with a name like Tremendous Johnson, I guarantee his swagger rating is through the roof.

But we wanted to know more about Johnson. What are his hopes and dreams? What were his computer parents thinking? How did a blatant dick joke get past the censors? For that, we turned to Kotaku's own Stick Jockey, Owen Good:

OK, without overthinking it, here's what's going on. He's in franchise mode and this is an auto-generated name for a college prospect in his upcoming draft. For this the game pulls from two databases, a first name and a last name, and this is their hilarious intersection.

So no one at EA Sports deliberately coded "Tremendous Johnson" as a prospect name, but the potential for it exists. It's nuts that "Tremendous" is a first name, but looking at my franchise, I see an Army QB named Qydarrius Evans, and a linebacker from LSU named Titarius Dixon. Wonder if he knows Barkevious.

The only other possibility is that he imported a draft class from NCAA Football 11, if he owns that, which means the name would have been generated by that game and project team. Or he could have created the player himself in NCAA 11, but it seems a bit of an effort to make this kind of joke. Fakes are usually sent to game blogs, not sports blogs anyway.

So there you have it. An unusual, but not implausible first name, randomly combined with a pedestrian surname, and you get comedy gold.

Not long after, Owen sent us a screengrab of Johnson's new teammate: