Champions Forever Boxing

To the casual observer, Champions Forever Boxing may look like a simple boxing game from the days of pixilated sprites and two-button controllers. While this may be an accurate first impression of the game, longtime video game boxing fans know that Champions Forever Boxing is to this day one of the very best games of its kind.

Not many boxing games let you maintain your title after you win it.

Sure, we've had innovative boxing games like Ready 2 Rumble, Knockout Kings, and even Victorious Boxers, but so far no game has been able to pull as many pieces of the boxing game puzzle together as Champions Forever. The highlight of the game was its career mode, which allowed you to take a no-name fighter from obscurity to the top of the heavyweight division. Along the way you actually earned money--not points, not something like money, but millions of dollars. The creators of Champions Forever Boxing were actually able to create tension with the fact that huge amounts of money were on the line, not to mention your reputation and record.

Every time you loaded your career, a bar graph displayed how long you had been fighting, your win/loss record, and your career winnings. While most of this may sound like it should be typical for a boxing game, you'd be surprised by how most boxing games focus on getting to the championship fight and ignore the rest of your career. Not Champions Forever. Once you won the championship in Champions Forever, it was all about seeing how long you could reign as the heavyweight champ--not because the opponents got harder over the years, but because your fighter's abilities deteriorated with time. In fact, after really tough bouts your fighter's attributes would be a bit weaker than before the fight began. This risk-versus-reward system made it important to always keep your fighter in good health.

You can't argue with a boxer named Bad.

The game featured some of the very best heavyweights of all time, such as Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Ken Norton Jr., and Joe Frazier. But really, it was the great and simple gameplay in Champions Forever Boxing that was ultimately what kept the few boxing fans that actually played it coming back for more. The game even had analog punching controls that allowed you to decide how far or fast a punch was thrown. Champions Forever Boxing was certainly ahead of its time, which is why we picked it as a game we'd like to see be remade. No one has been able to put together as solid a career mode system in a boxing game as Distinctive Software did way back in 1991.