Best sports video games of pre-modern era

Published July 4th, 2008

By Mario Sarmento
SPORTS COMMENTARY

What a time we live in, when we can seemingly watch any important Major league Baseball, NBA or NFL game on television.
We can also find out the score of any game in an instant, whether on the computer or TV, or even on the cell phone.
Now is a great time to be a sports fan, and it’s not just the major sports you have access to.

You can turn on the tube and find bowling, fishing, or anything else you’ve ever dreamed of watching.
This is also a great time to play sports video games.

The games today are so realistic and offer so many features that they make the games of yesterday look ancient by comparison.
For instance, I grew up playing Tecmo Bowl on the original Nintendo system.

In those dark days of video gaming, you could only choose one from among four offensive and defensive plays, and not every NFL team was represented in the game.

Trouble was, if a defense happened to pick the play you selected, you had almost no way of gaining any positive yardage.
There were three exceptions though.

If you were the San Francisco 49ers, you could drop deep enough with Joe Montana to fire a crossing pass over the middle to running back Roger Craig.

If you were the Chicago Bears, you could complete the same pass to tight end Cap Boso (remember him?) for yardage.
The only running back who could get out of the same situation was the great Bo Jackson, often described as the greatest video game athlete of all time.

Bo could split any defense open, find any hole, and run over anyone in his path.
Nowadays, games are too realistic for such a one-man army, and I would expect the future of the games to look like you’re actually watching a game on TV.

But for all the advances in gaming, some of the old-school charms have been lost.
The amazing graphics today are basically the same each year, and gameplay has gotten so complicated you’re going to need one of Mike Martz’s playbooks to figure out how to playhem.

With that, I’m going to give you the list of my favorite games from each of the sports during the period of 1990-2000, and why I selected them.

Later in the summer I’ll make the list of current faves from the modern era.
Here’s to hoping you can find some of these used at a store and discover these gems.
Football:

• Super Tecmo Bowl (Super Nintendo) – It had every team in the league, and was the first football game where you could play an entire season.

Basketball:
• Coach K (SEGA Genesis) – A surprise pick over the popular NBA Live series and NBA Jam, but I never had as much fun playing a basketball game as I did with this one. Bonus points for being able to deliver a hard foul to knock a key player out of the game.
Hockey:
• NHL 94 (SEGA Genesis) – Still the gold standard for hockey games. It was fun and easy to play, had the one-timer feature, and you could render someone unconscious with a big hit.
Baseball:

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