As a followup to the big borg news, Midway has announced that they didn’t want those pesky rights anyway.

“No longer bound to the NFL license, there will be no league restrictions on content and gamers will finally experience what makes playing a football video game really fun: off-field controversies, dirty hits, excessive celebrations and much more,” Midway marketing chief Steve Allison said in a statement.

Cool. While not giant robots, definitely a bold and aggressive step. As a semi-related tangent, someone who once worked at Midway told me that they tried to release Blitz at the same time that Madden released one year, and got crushed. Turns out, people don’t want their fantasy fake football at the start of the season – they want to get a simulator so they can imagine their teams making the superbowl. Blitz performs well later in the season, once the players have gotten bored of the simulation and it’s become clear that, say, a Testaverde-led team cannot actually make it to the post-season. I’m sure catharsis is a powerful motivator around then as well.