The Modern Era of Football Games

Along with the rest of the gaming world, the football game came of age in the 1990s. For the first time, steadily advancing technology freed designers to catch up with our imaginations. The immediate result: games that looked and played in a more realistic fashion than ever before. Official NFL licenses became commonplace, as did authentic rosters and playbooks that mirrored those used in the real world. The days of five-man teams and stick-figure quarterbacks were gone for good. Developments with computer graphics boards and the gradual move from 16- to 128-bit console systems permitted the depiction of players who both appeared and moved like the real thing. What we played in 1987 seemed hopelessly out of date as early as 1992.

The Genesis helped bring football and sports gaming into the modern era.

This new era actually began at the end of the 1980s. John Madden Football debuted in 1989 from Electronic Arts, kicking off a series that would evolve into the Cadillac of sports game franchises over the following decade. Madden soon branched out to most computer and console platforms and redefined sports gaming in every way. First and foremost, it upped the ante on realism. The overall design stressed a genuine version of pro football that made what had come before seem Pop Warner by comparison. Secondly, the successful development of Madden as a yearly franchise changed the way that sports games were marketed. Prior to this, the accepted logic was that you designed and sold one version of a sports game, perhaps augmenting it with a season disc or two. Afterward, the updated iteration of a sports game came out with calendarlike precision, the new title hitting store shelves just before the beginning of the equivalent real-world season. Hindsight has shown this to be a rather dubious achievement, though this hasn't taken away from Madden's impact.

Madden's prosperity spawned many rivals. In an attempt to further cement the reputation of the Sega Genesis as the best platform for sports games, Sega introduced Joe Montana Football in 1990. Early releases in this series offered a cruder version of football than that offered by Madden, though the quality did improve over time. It was also one of the first sports series to offer a lot of bells and whistles. Joe Montana II: Sports Talk Football and NFL Sports Talk Football 93 Starring Joe Montana included rudimentary commentary for the first time in a console football title. The latter boasted more than 500 separate one-liners, a remarkable achievement in the 16-bit era. Sega even branched out into college ball, adapting the Montana engine for use in the Bill Walsh College Football line.

The sheer number of buttons and sticks on modern controllers gave developers the flexibility to create more complex control schemes for football games.

For a brief time, there was a heated rivalry between the Madden and Montana series. Montana eventually lost, though this failure was due more to the rise of the Sony PlayStation as the next big console system than any problems with the game itself. One of the reasons why Sony did so well was that the company capitalized on the need to replace the aging Sega Genesis as the primary platform for sports games. An opening salvo was fired with NFL GameDay, released under Sony's 989 Sports label not long after the PlayStation itself reached stores in 1995. An NFL license, individual player stat tracking, great-looking visuals, and precise arcade control over the on-field action made it a huge hit.

Madden and GameDay seemed content to share the football gaming crown, although they still showed continual subtle improvement to fend off challengers like Acclaim's NFL Quarterback Club. There were some major advancements in the early to mid-1990s, but these were mostly registered on the PC side of things. The full sophistication of the NFL came through for the first time with Sierra's revolutionary Front Page Sports: Football. This series brought the virtual gridiron to a new height, thanks to complex playbooks, exhaustive stat tracking, and the ability to set up customized career leagues with drafts, trades, and retirements. Arcade play on the field was seamlessly blended with management responsibilities. It was the closest that developers had come to putting an NFL franchise in a box.

Hard to believe today, but the PC was once a dominant platform for football video games.

This raised the bar for everyone. New computer football titles like Accolade's NFL Legends Football 98 and Total Control Football tried to take the idea of a complete football game even further with frills such as historical play and financial management. An audience was also developed for pure management games such as Front Office Football and PC Action! Football. Perhaps more importantly, however, Madden and GameDay extended the simulation aspects of their games and soon added franchise play to their repertoires. With the notable exception of NFL Blitz, arcade sports games as a whole began a shift toward realism. After Front Page Sports: Football showed everyone what was possible, gamers stopped settling for anything less than the whole package.