Sports games today are all about lifelike graphics and realism, but once upon a time, the games were simpler and arguably far more fun to play. Lets take a look at five retro sports games that are better than their modern-day counterparts.
PGA Tour Golf: To think that the eventual EA Sports juggernaut was built on the backs of games in the baseball and golf genres is a hard message to convey to a young gamer that sees the Madden series as the cornerstone of the EA empire today. But way before the NBA 2K franchise beat on NBA Live and dominated the hardwood and before Knockout Kings disappeared in favor of UFC, Electronic Arts broke into the sports genre with games such as Earl Weaver Baseball on PC and, PGA Tour Golf, on the Sega Genesis.
The first Genesis game to have a PGA license, the game ironically had more of an arcade punch to it, channeling the careers of the team that designed it. Developed by Lee Actor and Dennis Koble, known for their work on such Atari ports such as Pit-Fighter and Hard Drivin’, PGA Tour was the type of pick up and play experience that much like the NHL and Lakers. vs. Celtics games that followed it from EA, invited players to the genre.
Over 30 years since it was released on the Sega Genesis, Traeger still remembers what was so enjoyable about the title and how it almost never happened.
“It was really successful and the license was cool. It took the thunder out a lot of other golf games that didn’t have the licensing. Golf games, even on early technology, used a lot of data,” Traeger said. “In the early days, we would just walk the courses with cameras and try to record the data as much as we could. Then we had, individual sessions with the golfers where we were just videotaping their swings. This was way before the motion capture stuff and all that. The license gave us access to all the PGA courses and all those players. They weren’t like big superstars, so they were all pretty accessible. A lot of them were pretty technology aware. The partnership worked really well. We had a lot of data and all those courses. But the thing about the core of the game, it had been around in EA for a while. It was just a golf simulator.”
Roger Clemens MVP Baseball:
Designed by Perry Rodgers, a former Twin Galaxies Gaming Champion, member of the US National Video Game Team, co-founder of the Amusement Players Association (APA) with Steve Harris and Jeff Peters, which published the Top Score Newsletter, a predecessor to Harris’ Electronic Gaming Monthly, as well as Senior Producer of some of the original PlayStation’s biggest titles including Parappa the Rapper, Final Fantasy VII and Gran Turismo, this was an opportunity early in his career to do more than produce. Behind the wheel for the entire development cycle, Rodgers had some clear objectives for his baseball game.
“I was working at Activision. That was my first job in gaming,” Rodgers said. “I was a Product Specialist and Associate Producer. I was there for about two, two and a half years. After a while, I got this- ‘I want to make my own game’ idea. That’s obviously very common in the industry. But being that Activision was more of a publisher than a developer at the time, that wasn’t going to probably happen there. So I can’t recall exactly how I got in talks with George Metos from Sculptured Software. I believe it was because of some work that I had been doing for Activision, but I just can’t recall the details on that. He flew me out there and we talked about doing my own games. I’ve always liked sports games in general. One of the games I wanted to do was a baseball game, but I wanted to do something different.”
NFL 98
NFL 98 is easily one of the most in-depth football simulations in the history of the Sega Genesis but sadly came at a time when most people were hungry for the games on the Sega Saturn and PlayStation. Featuring a full-season mode, player creation, trades, team relocation options and a variety of in-game tuning options, it boasts a set of gameplay tools many first-generation 32-bit games do not. However, with 16-bit visuals, even the best on the Genesis at the time wasn’t enough to entice players away from sexy new consoles. As a result, NFL 98, regardless of everything it did right, is seen as a lost gem on the Genesis console.
Developed by a Spectacular Games team led by Michael Brook, who also worked on NFL 95 and Deion Sanders Prime Time NFL 96, the group was ready to deliver their best edition yet. Fixing several gameplay bugs that hampered previous versions of the series, NFL 98 is the best edition of the series and a million seller on the console. According to Brook, that had a lot to do with the love affair he and the team had with the Genesis. The reason for that affection for the console is simple – Brook helped build the Genesis as a viable console as a producer at Electronic Arts. Helping take the publisher from the PC to the Genesis, Brook saw NFL 98 as the end of a special era.
“I loved the Genesis,” Brook said. “My feelings (at the start of NFL 98’s development) were really, ‘Boy, I’d rather be doing Genesis development.’ I was very sad to see it go away. I was feeling as if, if this were another media, like a book or a movie, I’d have a chance to keep making my mark with great products on this system. It’s too bad because while the Genesis might’ve been replaced by 32-bit platforms, it, by no means, was no longer a viable system. That was kind of sad that there really was no room for it because it just didn’t look as good even though it played great and probably better than the 32-bit machines, certainly at the start. But because of the looks, it had no hope. The industry moved much more towards marketing the visual experience. Part of that was that the way you made your money at the time was to simply sell the game, in which the publisher made all its money up front on a one-time sale. It really didn’t matter how much somebody played it – it was whether you sold it. Now we’re in a completely different era where many games are free to play and you buy features or pieces of the game later on. Gameplay is everything. At the time of the Genesis, in the 90s, that wasn’t the case.”
Coach K Basketball: Mike “Coach K” Krzyzewski’s name will forever be with the college basketball gods as one of the greatest bench bosses in NCAA history. With five national championships under his belt (as of this writing), Coach K’s resume speaks for itself. Combine that with EA’s penchant for creating top-notch basketball experiences and it’s one of the best roundball games on the Sega Genesis.
However, unlike the long-time success other celebrity-endorsed games have had under the EA umbrella, Such as John Madden, Tiger Woods and evening Earl Weaver, Coach K only had one opportunity at the free-throw line, but managed to turn the experience into a three-point play. Originally released in 1995, it wasn’t until three years later that EA began its long-running March Madness franchise, which later morphed into NCAA Basketball. But regardless if it’s short tenure on the virtual court, Coach K’s Basketball left a nearly untarnished level of precision on the court during its time.
“Upon completion of NBA Live 95 we were all discussing the excitement of the NCAA Tournament and the incoming players that would be in NBA Live 96,” Dave Warfield, the game’s Assistant Producer and Designer said. “With Duke winning back to back tournaments and so many great players, it made sense for us to leverage the Live engine we had created with the Isometric view, and build on the interest of the yearly March Madness. As the team was looking at the next iteration of NBA Live, I split off to work with a small team to create a game that took the best of the NBA and created a different experience.”
Triple Play 96: It’s hard to believe, but at one point, EA Sports was extremely focused on producing quality baseball games. Way before MVP Baseball was a thing, Triple Play Baseball was a series that millions of gamers flocked to. At one point in the franchise’s history, it was a consistent million-seller on the Sony PlayStation and PlayStation 2. Before that dominance, however, EA was in a different type of ballgame on the Sega Genesis and was just trying to find its footing. At one point, the publisher had MLBPA Baseball, Tony LaRussa Baseball and even its classic PC series, Earl Weaver Baseball all trying to grab a piece of the virtual baseball pie. But somewhere between Earl Weaver’s rise on the PC and the end of the Sega Genesis lifespan, Triple Play came into existence and set the bar high enough to warrant a litany of sequels that took the series into the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, GameCube and PlayStation 2 cycles.
But way before the game was repackaged as MVP Baseball, the Triple Play franchise was one of the last baseball games on the Sega Genesis and was put right in the middle of a dogfight for supremacy among a plethora of contenders including RBI Baseball ’94, Sega’s World Series Baseball ’96 and Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball. Just around the time when EA began to understand how important yearly updates were to their sports franchises and the adopting of that mentality with all of their other sports games, the brand knew it was time to get serious about baseball. Although they released Tony LaRussa, Super Baseball 2020 and MLBPA Baseball from 1992-1994, with no authentic MLB license, the games didn’t have the staying power as EA’s other games in the NBA and NHL. Although Triple Play 96 didn’t have an MLB license either, it was out to change the way baseball games on the Genesis felt by offering a slew of modes and features not found in their previous baseball games including hot and cold streaks, the ability to create minor leaguers and the best visuals of any of their prior 16-bit games based on America’s pastime.
The post Five Sports Games That Have Us Wish Again For Simpler Times appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.
