Football season is almost upon us. Long before we had an annual series to play, the picks for football were very slim. That changed in 1989 when Tecmo created Tecmo Bowl. This game was fun and had some of the most interesting choices in a video game.
The setup was easy. You picked if you were going to play against the computer or a human player. There was a third option called coach in which only the plays were chosen. There were four offense plays while the defense would try and pick what defensive position could make the offensive line collapse. If you had the ball, you tried to avoid the other plays and score. The defensive tried to intercept the ball or get the person who had it.
Revolutionary at the time, the players from the teams were the real players from the previous season. Even their statistics were the same. when the game was re released a year later, the roster and stats had changed. The NFL did not give Tecmo Bowl the rights to use the team names, but they were named for their cites. All of this set people up for the unstoppable force known as Bo Jackson. You couldn’t tackle Jackson, it just wasn’t possible. He would get the ball and then just go through defenders. He might have been the video game’s first broken character. The man even had his own special play in the playbook.
Tecmo Bowl spawned many sequels, but eventually the rest of the video game world caught up. This games’s importance is still felt, as it was one of the games included on the Nintendo Classic Edition. It was the forefather to the sports games that would come after. At lest modern games left out Bo Jackson. Man, you just couldn’t stop that guy.
