While these games looked nothing like what we see Saturdays these days, they sparked an interest in football and are a huge reason why the sport we know and love today exists. FBS Football. The first American football game ever was played Nov. Watch: Princeton's Matt Allocco sinks birthday buzzer-beater, remains at the top of Ivy League On Princeton guard Matt Allocco's birthday, he made a game-winning shot to defeat Cornell.
Boxing Day will forever be a red letter day in the calendar of football fans around the world. Just a day after we've overindulged on just about every food imaginable, are we treated to yet another feast - but this time it's football on the menu. So it's perhaps apt that 26 December is such a memorable day in sports fans' diaries when you hear it also marks a very significant anniversary.
These films look back on Sheffield's football history. The first ever official football match took part on Boxing Day , and to mark the th anniversary of the event, we're taking a look back at the day that changed the sporting landscape all over the world.
Founded in October , Sheffield FC have been recognised by FIFA as the world's oldest football club with Notts County recognised as the oldest existing football league club, before you say anything. NFL 94 had some good qualities, including refined zooming-in during play, but NFL 95 seemed unfinished, with choppy graphics and lots of slowdown. But there was one positive: As bad as NFL 97 was, it didn't scare Sega away from football games altogether.
NFL 2K for the next-generation Sega Dreamcast console system made it clear that the company still had what it took to create an excellent gridiron simulation. Sega returned to football gaming in a big way in As part of the launch festivities for the company's heralded next-generation Dreamcast console system, NFL 2K was released.
Indeed, the game hit shelves with almost as much fanfare as the system received, with preview buzz all but proclaiming that this would be the best football game of all time. NFL 2K made the Dreamcast a system to be reckoned with.
Those pundits weren't far from the mark. Though die-hard Madden and GameDay addicts might still defend their respective series of choice as the ultimate in football gaming, critics were simply blown away by NFL 2K. We awarded it one of the highest review scores ever awarded at GameSpot--Ryan MacDonald gave it a lofty 9. This score was well deserved. Computer AI was tremendous.
Each of the clubs came with custom playbooks that they used to the hilt, playing up their strengths and attempting to hide their weaknesses in the same fashion that their counterparts did each Sunday afternoon in the real world.
Meaning that you could expect a shootout in games against the St. Louis Rams and a low-scoring, ground-control affair when up against the New York Giants. Every team displayed characteristics that were fully discernible by any follower of the real NFL. And better yet, all of the teams displayed smarts when it came to clock management. Watching the computer quarterback take a knee in the dying seconds was a satisfying sight--even if you were on the short end of the scoreboard. Better visuals and career play made NFL 2K1 an improvement.
This accurate "feel" was further accentuated with a precise control system. Gamepad response was excellent, a quick tug on the analog stick allowing you to move players exactly where you wanted them to go. Full use of the Dreamcast controller's buttons allowed the full range of motion on the field, incorporating stiff-arms, jukes, and jumps into every player's repertoire. Visual detail reached an unprecedented level of expertise.
Players were given the recognizable faces of their NFL inspirations and motion-capped animation that gave each game the appearance of a TV broadcast. Plays even withstood the "slow-motion test. Unlike editions of Madden released around the same time, balls were handed off, thrown, and caught exactly according to the laws of physics. Stadiums were modeled after the real thing, with each park having the proper artwork and fans along with team-specific signage. Play-by-play commentary reached a new height.
The no-name broadcast team may have lacked the Fox TV glitz of John Madden and Pat Summerall, but it made up for its anonymity by nailing nearly every play with dead-on observations. Specific, varied references and quick response time sold the illusion that you were listening to real people commenting on a football game.
If you've played any Sega football game, the names Dan Stevens and Peter O'Keefe are forever emblazoned on your brain like a bad Vietnam flashback. The twosome provided in-game commentary for every single entry in the 2K franchise, as well as provided some of the stupidest, yet most strangely entertaining, commentary ever shoved into a sports game. However, did you know that neither of them is actually real? Indeed, Dan Stevens and Peter O'Keefe are entirely fictional characters voiced by a pair of veteran voice actors.
Stevens was voiced by an actor named Jay Styne. Styne is a video game voice acting vet who voiced prominent roles in games like Skies of Arcadia and Syphon Filter 2.
Voice actor Terry McGovern took on the role of O'Keefe, a wisecracking ex-ball coach with a penchant for food analogies. McGovern's been all over the place, taking actual onscreen roles in movies like Mrs. Doubtfire , American Graffiti , and even Star Wars he got to utter the famous sandtrooper line, "These aren't the droids we're looking for". But he's also got a ton of video game and cartoon voice acting credits to his name, voicing stunticon Wildrider on the Transformers animated series and Launchpad McQuack on Duck Tales.
The Stevens and O'Keefe characters were designed to be sort of a spoof of modern-day football callers, though not so much so as to be purely comedic. O'Keefe's "You can't coach that! His love of food was probably another goof on the same commentator. As for Stevens, just think of any other straight-man play-by-play guy ever to hit the booth and you've got a perfect amalgamation of all of them in his nasally exclamations.
Though the two had never called an actual football game together, Styne and McGovern had a phenomenal chemistry that made their work sound about a billion times more authentic than most professional commentators that do the same thing on TV only worse. We can only hope that one day 2K Games opts to make another football game and decides to bring the infamous pair of Stevens and O'Keefe back to the commentator booth.
Unfortunately, NFL 2K didn't launch the football gaming juggernaut that was expected of it. NFL 2K1 came out as planned--and was even an improvement upon its predecessor--but the Sega Dreamcast that hosted the series bombed at the sales counter, failing to make much of an impact against Sony and Nintendo. As a result, the system was shelved at the beginning of Games would still be produced for the platform for a limited time, though it soon became obvious that such support would be minimal.
Months after the Dreamcast release of 2K2, PlayStation 2 and Xbox ports of the game were released on a staggered schedule with the Xbox version hitting stores just before that year's Super Bowl.
Though neither version managed Madden-level numbers, the debut of the 2K franchise on non-Sega consoles was a significant improvement. The features that had made the game so great on the Dreamcast, such as the excellent gameplay engine, wonderful sense of presentation, and great game modes like online play and franchise, were refined to a brilliant level of quality. Though the GameCube lacked the online as did the Xbox version, at least for a short while after its release , all three versions of the game were just as polished as the other.
Furthermore, 2K3 marked an important debut for the franchise: namely, the addition of the official ESPN license.
Though the presence of the ESPN name and branding was only really noticeable in text menus and on in-game stat overlays, it gave the Sega brand of football something it had lacked when compared to EA's game: a real-life sports name to help lend credibility to the franchise.
To some degree, it worked, as sales continued to improve over the previous year's iteration. Sadly, Sega was still getting spanked badly by Madden.
NFL 2K3 offered incredible detail. Opting to drop the 2K name from the title but still keeping it on the box in a less-than-prominent fashion , Sega's ESPN NFL Football was designed to be a different kind of football game. Once again including all the features that Sega fans fell in love with, this game brought to the table brand-new methods of play--some good and others Though the usefulness of collecting posters and other weird bric-a-brac is debatable, many of the other collectibles were a welcome addition, adding plenty of extra value to the package.
The other big debut, however, wasn't quite the slam-dunk feature that Sega seemed to be hoping for. Going so far as to announce this new mode at a special press event at the ESPN restaurant in New York City, Sega's highly touted first-person-football mode just didn't quite come together as well as it could have. ESPN NFL Football wasn't the first game to feature a first-person-camera option to try to give players the sensation of actually being on the field, but it was the first to make a whole bloody mode out of it.
The controls were different from a typical game, and the handling of the players also took quite a bit of getting used to. To its credit, the mode really did give you a sense of what it's like to be on the field, with defensive linemen staring you down and the cacophony of the crowd surrounding you wherever you turned.
Unfortunately, it just wasn't a great deal of fun. The running and return games weren't half bad, as it wasn't too difficult to try to weave your way through defenders, but everything else was just confusing. The passing game was just a giant pain in the ass thanks to the weird camera shifts, and defense just didn't have a whole lot going on.
First person football didn't end up being all it was cracked up to be. Between the lackluster marquee feature, the all-new branding, and a downright scary box cover featuring the glaring, monstrous eyes of cover boy Warren Sapp ESPN NFL Football tanked in sales.
Whatever the case, Sega ended up giving a lot of ground back to Madden. Things looked grim for Sega's sports division, and rumors swirled about developer Visual Concepts. Would it be shut down? Would it get sold off, possibly to EA? Finally, a ray of hope arrived in the form of publisher Take-Two Interactive. But with that announcement came more rumors and speculation. That's right, 2K was going budget. Visual Concepts confirmed the price change not long afterward and also soon announced that for the first time in as long as anyone could remember, the game would be shipping well before its archrival, hitting stores a full two weeks before Madden would be available.
Between the price drop and the bumped release schedule, fans, critics, and, most notably, EA, could no longer ignore 2K football, as Sega and Take-Two came out swinging. The resulting game was no worse for the wear, bringing out another excellent round of football, once again jam-packed with great features. Sure, first-person football was still kind of lame, and the addition of weird D-list celebrities like Carmen Electra and Steve-O was beyond stupid, but the additions for the better far outweighed those for the dumb.
The ESPN license had been implemented even more brilliantly this time around, bringing such personalities as Chris Berman and Suzie Kolber to life or, at least, polygonal life with digitized versions of them that appeared for pregame and postgame analysis.
The franchise mode was the deepest and most involved one the series had ever attempted, giving unprecedented levels of control over coaching, finance, and all the other little trials and tribulations in the day-to-day ops of a professional club. And then there were the two most revelatory features: the VIP profile system and the new online league system. VIP profiles gave you unique, individual profiles for each coach featured in the game.
Playcalling tendencies, styles of offense and defense, and, hell, even how often they chose to run to the right, left, or middle was kept track of. Even more insane, you could create your own VIP profile to track your tendencies, and people playing the game online could download the profile to scout against you.
Of course, you could do the same to them, adding a surreal level of depth to online play that many had never even considered dreaming about before. As for the online leagues, in theory, this was nothing new. VC had tried leagues the year previous, but they'd flopped pretty hard in terms of popularity. Every single detail from a league game could be viewed from the site, adding a major air of authenticity to the whole package. The result in sales was a big improvement, and Sega's football course was then righted.
The combination of the budget pricing, the return to the old naming convention, and, of course, the incredible game itself helped lure previous detractors to the product.
Sadly, that good fortune wasn't meant to last. Sega's momentum in football gaming ground to an earth-shattering halt, and things only got crazier from there. Little more than a month later, EA then signed an unprecedented year exclusivity deal with ESPN, thus removing another huge component that was key to Visual Concepts' success.
The football legacy that Sega had helped start on the Dreamcast was finally over. Of course, that didn't mean the end for Visual Concepts and its sports lineup. The developer has now officially been made a part of 2K Games, a new publishing banner under Take-Two's wing. As for football, however, no one really knows what the future holds. But with only scant few rumors to draw from, hope is quickly fading.
Nobody had ever seen anything like Front Page Sports: Football when it debuted in Sierra On-Line's Dynamix division crafted the game to be a total re-creation of the NFL, complete in nearly every way. Just presenting the basics of the sport wasn't good enough for this design team. Along with a meticulous depiction of the gridiron game, Dynamix painstakingly detailed every aspect of NFL operations, from custom playbooks for every team to multiseason career play.
It was every die-hard football fan's dream come true. Actually, it was every computer-owning football fan's dream come true, as there were no other credible football games available for the PC at that time.
Revamped graphics made the '96 edition the best. So it shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the original game developed a sizable following in short order. Many still regard that game as the Holy Grail of football simulations, a remarkable achievement that has yet to be matched. Some of its features evoke envy even today. For example, the CD-ROM version came with 10, different plays, a figure that was light years removed from the measly two dozen or so included with Madden games of the time.
Each team used different playbooks designed to accentuate their strengths. And a complex play editor let you design and store your own plays if you didn't find enough choice in the default selections. Franchise play was truly outstanding. You could get lost in Football Pro 95 for months, guiding a club from season to season, through good times and bad, from rebuilding years to championship drives. Seasons unfolded like stories, with every game, signing, and trade somehow interacting.
There was something natural about the way that everything unfolded. What's more, the AI was spectacular. And very, very astute. Along with responding to single-game trends, the computer reacted to plays used frequently in earlier weeks in the season as if it had scouts in the stands watching those contests. As a result, the killer play that surprised everyone in week three wasn't nearly as effective in week six.
No other sports game in memory provided as much of a long-term challenge as Front Page Sports: Football Pro Later editions improved the eye candy, if not the stability. The only thing that really stood between the Front Page Sports: Football Pro line and mass-market acceptance was terrible quality control. Every one of the releases after Football Pro 95 was seriously unstable. Stability actually seemed to decline every year.
The '96 edition crashed to the desktop only every once in a while, but the '98 one went down all the time. Numerous patches were required to make it even remotely playable, and even then, problems persisted.
Such shoddy programming reached a nadir with the '99 version, which was released to stores to meet the holiday rush in a completely unplayable state. Sierra briefly considered patching the game but then decided to abandon the series entirely in January of A recall notice was issued, and the game was pulled from the shelves. Lingering attachment to the series caused a few hard-core fans to attempt fixing the game on their own, though most just cursed Sierra and turned their attentions back to the 95 or 96 games both of which are still played in online leagues.
Although the Front Page Sports: Football line died an ugly death, the influence of the series lingered. In addition to the way that it forced EA Sports to adopt management options in the Madden series, it spawned a host of imitators.
Unfortunately, most of the copies were also-rans that lasted just one or two seasons. ABC Monday Night Football was probably the best of these games, earning a devoted following that demanded and received a sequel. Others, such as Accolade's wholly worthless Legends Football 98 and Blue Sky Software's interesting but fatally flawed Total Control Football, weren't worth anyone's time or money.
Looking on the positive side of things, one can make a case that Front Page Sports: Football made it possible for later football management games to thrive. Without Dynamix and Sierra bringing franchise play and serious stat-crunching to the masses, it's hard to imagine the likes of the Front Office Football and Action! PC Football lines of text-based management simulators building such substantial followings.
After spending 15 years on the sidelines, college football finally got into the game in Electronic Arts saw the light at last and founded a Sega Genesis series based on the John Madden Football line, but it featured collegiate clubs instead of their professional counterparts.
Bill Walsh College Football took a bow in and soon developed a strong following--not surprising given the rabid fan base that draws around , people to games at big schools like the University of Florida. Bill Walsh College Football for the Genesis in At first, Bill Walsh College Football was nothing more than a carbon copy of the latest Madden game, with 24 current clubs and 24 of the best college teams since taking the place of the 28 NFL franchises.
There was no NCAA license, so these teams represented fictional schools with close ties to their real-world equivalents. The fact that this was a quickie port of an NFL game was apparent in almost every way. Season mode was absent, bowl play was replaced with an unrealistic playoff system, and many trademark college formations were left out.
Aside from the presence of Stanford legend Bill Walsh, there simply wasn't much of a collegiate feel in this game. That changed with the acquisition of the NCAA license for the sequel. Bill Walsh College Football 95 boasted 36 of the top collegiate teams in the nation with complete rosters. Even better, you could put them through their paces in full season play that led to either a bowl appearance or a playoff to determine a national champion.
Playbooks were finally reworked to include such college standbys as the offensive wishbone and the flex--and the defensive plays needed to counter them. A look at EA Sports' broadcast booth from the front end. While Madden survived that year's cancellations on the PC and the Sony PlayStation, its sister title vanished for good.
College ball fans at the time had a good alternative to turn to with Sega's College National Championship, though. This series, which survived for just the and editions, combined the latter-day Joe Montana engine with college teams and revamped playbooks.
Gameplay was quite good, and as the title suggested, you could guide your favorite club on a national title drive over a full season.
Unfortunately, the series failed to improve much in its transition to the other platform. The arcadelike feel of the franchise just failed to catch on with college football fanatics, who were looking for a game that really highlighted the subtle differences between college and pro games. The game offered a fantastic presentation, but a clunky interface relegated it to second-string status in the minds of many.
The series finally hit its stride with GameBreaker '99, which included commentary from legendary announcer Keith Jackson and offered the ability to pitch the ball--an important feature for college, where option offenses can flourish with the right backfield.
GameBreaker continued that excellence, with a dynasty mode that offered you the chance to recruit new players and send your graduating classes into the draft for 's NFL GameDay.
Unfortunately, the series failed to step up its game when the PlayStation 2 arrived. Year after year, GameBreaker was getting left further and further behind by the competition, which utilized the new hardware for graphics and features better than Sony's franchise. A year after Sega and Visual Concepts gave up on college football, Sony followed suit, making NCAA GameBreaker the last in a promising series that just didn't evolve fast enough for the times.
That left EA all alone, with a de facto monopoly on college football. This outstanding title for the PlayStation included more than teams, a dynasty mode of play that stretched over numerous seasons, college playbooks, and the distinct flavor of being on campus, with school fight songs, logos, and mascots.
A limited version of the game found its way to the PC for the first two years of the franchise's existence, though it wasn't very successful, and that platform has been bereft of college football ever since. The series continued on both the PlayStation and the PlayStation 2, gradually improving with each passing season. NCAA , the first such game on the PlayStation 2, offered authentic-looking stadiums and teams that truly played like their real-life counterparts.
That iteration of the game nailed down the nuances and intricacies of the college game just right and also offered a fully fleshed out dynasty mode that let you spend weeks recruiting players and making pitches to prospects. The next year, EA released NCAA , which added online play to the Xbox version as well as the PS2 version and tried to further impart a college flavor to the game by modeling player morale.
The effects of a road stadium on a visiting team were also modeled. Unfortunately these effects were a bit overexaggerated, and most egregiously, receivers dropped far too many balls, resulting in a game that many felt took a step back from the previous year.
The anxiety of college football fans was fueled even more when, months before the release of NCAA , Electronic Arts snapped up the exclusive license to create video games based on NCAA football for six years.
NCAA from EA is the only college football series left, but if 06 was any indication, college football fans have nothing to worry about. Fortunately for those of us who love college football, NCAA addressed many of the concerns from the previous year's edition, bringing back the near-perfect play balance from NCAA and adding in-season recruiting and a Race for the Heisman mode, which let you play out a single player's career over the course of four seasons.
At least in the short term, the quality of the game sated the concerns of those who were afraid EA might rest on its laurels, having earned both a de facto and a de jure monopoly on the sport.
EA holds control for another five years, so it will be interesting to see how it evolves its college football simulation into the next generation of consoles.
Jamaican drug lords. A crime-filled backstory. Underground fighting. What do these seemingly disparate things have in common? The game, dubbed Road to Sunday , was from the outset an exercise in ambition. It was a game that seeked to tie a smorgasbord of game types under a story umbrella that had you choosing members of your football team to compete in weekly underground fighting matches before suiting up for game day the following weekday or weekend. To be sure, there were some things to like about RTS.
The position-specific gameplay, too, was a nice idea, as it challenged the gamer to play the role from the perspective of the skilled players on the gridiron, running routes as a wideout, making tackles as a linebacker, and so forth. Beyond this innovation, RTS' downfall seemingly came down to the old phrase "two many irons in the fire. Instead, by tossing in stereotypical tough guys, a plot that Elmore Leonard would scoff at, and carefully focus-tested urban grit, you were left with the impression that the Road to Sunday was less the product of passionate developers and more the result of well-meaning but confused marketing types.
Alas, Road to Sunday, we'll miss you. Without the NFL license, developers and publishers have no crutch on which to rest their faulty gameplay and bad design choices.
Any company looking to put out a football game post will need an airtight concept and near-flawless execution to even make a dent in public perception, a fact the folks at Sony have come to realize the hard way. And perhaps Sony will even revive the GameDay moniker one day. Or maybe it'll enter into a bidding war once the NFL license comes up for auction in For now, though, we'll remember Road to Sunday as a product of its time, the first reaction from a company trying to cope with a rapidly changing sports gaming market.
Being in the right place at the right time can be a godsend in the gaming world. And no game better exemplifies that maxim than NFL GameDay, which arrived for the Sony PlayStation at the exact moment that the console system began to take off in In , the two teams agreed to play, with Mansfield fielding a club team since they were playing a high school after all. Instead, the Mounties compete in Sprint Football — a non-NCAA sport that resembles collegiate football in virtually every way, except for the requirement that all players weigh no more than pounds 48 hours prior to kickoff.
Thomas Aquinas. Michigan, Rutgers, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Villanova, and others all fielded teams in the past, but have since cut their programs. Some notable names have come out of the game. And, on Sept. The Mountaineers won the game FBS Football. Mansfield's reenactment of the first-ever night football game in Mansfield's football team, which went on the season.
0コメント