Feature
When it comes to the sports game hall of fame, history shows that simple fun has always won out.
Things were good back in the day. It wasn’t all about realistic physics, emergent color commentary, cover curses, and accurate sponsorships. It was about the game. Why, back then, every fight was 10 yards long and every dribble was double! The blades were of steel and the bases were loaded! The rivals were arch. Men were men, leagues were mutant, and we played out our brutal competitions where they belonged: in the arcade. Also on the couch, but it always felt like the arcade. Good-ol’-days reminiscence and over-extended metaphors aside, sports games were a very different beast at the dawn of gaming; they were practically everything. The very first videogame ever made, William Higginbotham’s “Tennis For Two,” was a sports game.
Higginbotham’s re-appropriation of one of the Brookhaven National Institute’s analog computers to display a controllable, electronic volley on an oscilloscope screen was, naturally, primitive. Tennis For Two was representational: A fine, green-hued sleight of hand to make the mind think of tennis instead of perfectly mimicking the physicality of the sport. The same could be said of almost every sports videogame made for the next 25 years — evolution was slow in coming. The first real rush of sports games came alongside the Japanese development boom of the late ’70s and early ’80s, and it’s their legacy that defines the loose sub-genre colloquially known as “arcade sports.” Nintendo’s Baseball, Ice Hockey, Tennis, and 10 Yard Fight beget Konami’s Blades of Steel and Double Dribble, which, in turn, birthed Tecmo’s beloved Tecmo Bowl. The dramatics of Konami and Tecmo’s games — Blades of Steel is still remembered for bringing fights to videogame hockey, while Double Dribble is immortalized thanks to its early usage of cut-scenes — separated them from Nintendo’s clunkers, but the lot of them weren’t terribly different from Tennis For Two at a design level. They all took the rules of the sports that inspired them, and used them as a foundation for simple, repetitive game types that required limited player input.
