Do you remember the classic sports games? The big name brand football, baseball and basketball franchises of the retro-gaming era? If not that listen up and if so then prepare for a trip down memory lane. Each of these sports had an icon back in the day, let’s starts out with football.
Tecmo Bowl! The original football game.
Everyone knows John Madden but there is an even more prestigious title game that spans the classical era of home gaming. His name? Tecmo. On the 8-bit there was Tecmo Bowl and 16 had Super Tecmo Bowl. These games were the gold standard of couch potato sport. League play, seasons, injuries – these games were a step ahead when it came to simulating the professional football league on the home gaming console. The extensive stats these games kept were also a big plus for the nerd type, who certainly played these games (me included.) When football got boring you could turn over to basketball, let’s focus on the Super Nintendo where the hottest game out there was a basketball classic.
Everybody whose was anybody when it came to gaming had NBA Jam. This game was ON FIRE!!! Alright, you know what I mean if you owned it. This game had all the craziest stuff, it wasn’t really true to life but it was sick. You played two on two and could play with your friends or against the computer. You could break the backboard, get on fire, knock down people and fly with the limited automatically recharging turbo boost button. This game was a ton of fun and it also included a really fun league mode. All the pro team’s best players were here too which was added fun if you were a fan of the actual NBA teams. Last but not least let’s turn to baseball.
Do you remember whose name used to ring baseball bells back in the good ol’ gaming
Retro gaming - TOUCHDOWN!!
days? I’ll give you a hint: Ken. Give up? C’mon, you know who it is! Ken Griffey Jr. – the original baseball superstar. This gaming franchise was the best baseball simulator on the market for Nintendo and it was a great deal of fun. Like the other sports games we’ve gone over this one included great league play, multiplayer and extensive stat tracking, all of these qualities greatly extended the replay ability of the sim. This was a great game and a classic of the baseball simulators. That sums up the three bigs of classic sports gaming but there are plenty of other quality simulators out there.