The curse of Tecmo Bowl: how licensing ruined sports games

And the monopoly for EA on the NFL license sucks because Madden '06 for the Xbox 360 is flat-out garbage....with no competition in sight, we're stuck with it until next year. Terrible move by the NFL, but then again, I'm sure they could care less about the games....it's all about the $.

Tecmo Bowl is arguably the best sports game i've ever played in terms of fun. 4 plays, cover your controller from you on-looking opponent, and just let Walter Payton do the rest. Classic!

Hey Chris Suellentrop,

have you played EA's NBA Live 2006 for the 360 yet? Well, if you have then you obviously threw out that rant BEFORE having played it since it is undoubtedly the best basketball game AND league simulation EVER CREATED!

fifa 96 for super nintendo is pretty hard to beat... but other than nes and snes... does anybody even like sports games??

Has anyone ever created a PC version of Tecmo Bowl? Some kind of emulator possibly?

Would be really cool to play this game again, also would love to play Excitebike, Double-Dribble, and more...

NO---EA ruined it.

Live 2006 (for 360) the best basketball sim ever created? Hardly.

The game is average at best....most reviews would agree with that as well.

Shoot, after playing both basketball games for the 360, I came to the conclusion that NBA 2K6 is by far the better game. Controls, gameplay, interface, modes, etc. are all far superior to Live '06.

If Tecmo hadn't done it first, someone else would have.

And Tecmo Bowl didn't have an NFL license, it had an NFLPA license, which is why all the player names were in there, but team logos and uniforms weren't.

The only thing that will save sports games is true online multiplayer -- five-on-five baskeball and hockey, etc.

baseball stars is still the best baseball and sports game of all time.

You know what? I agree with him.

Back in the days of the NES - and even through some of the SNES - I actually enjoyed playing sports games. Especially when we're talking about ones that take heavy creative license with how the game is played (Arch Rivals, Baseball Simulator 1.000, Baseball Stars, Base Wars).

Nowadays I can't find anything that returns me to the same fun - it's just hard simulation, hard realism. I always just get so bored with it all. I don't give a damn how many realistic beads of sweat are on LeBron James' head or how realistically scraggly Steve Nash's hair is.

Japan still has it right even if they do have licensed sports games. Anyone ever seen the Powerful Pro Baseball franchise from Konami? One year they worked in an alien invasion RPG. Another year I believe they worked in a Tokimeki-style dating sim. Almost all of them have a variety of mini-games.

If only US sports game developers had that sort of nerve.

A second thought I had:

EA Big has to bring back the Mutant League games.

Ironic that those were the last great gasp of sports game creativity.

Sorry to tell you Johny-D, but Live 06 is awful compared to NBA 2K6. Sure, the graphics might be a tad more photorealistic, but in terms of gameplay, features, presentation, and pretty much everything else, 2K6 wins hands down.

P.s. Unlike the players in Live 06 that look like they have been running a marathon at the start of the game and lack any type of emotion, the sweat engine in 2K6 is much more realistic (progressive) and the players actually show some emotion. And the cloth simulation rocks!!

I don't think innovation as a whole has been stifled that much. These other fun sports games came out at a time when gameplay was still incredibly primitive. Mutant league and the like had a big market because the sport sim. genre was done so poorly. With technological advancements innovation has come into sports video games not in fun whacky ideas, but in increased realism. (Adjusting coverages pre-snap, passer vision, shifting line protection.)

Those off-beat games were a way to get at a market that wasn't sold on the realism of say Tecmo. So if you were going to play a sports game that didn't feel real to you either way, why not make it one with mutants?

Techmo Bowl was licensed by the NFLPA but not the NFL. So the player names could be used, but not the team names. They just used city names.

"If Tecmo hadn't done it first, someone else would have."

Tecmo DIDN'T do it first. Sheesh:

http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/games/credits/sports.html#baseball

Not just baseball either. Look at all the sports games on that list. Almost every single one of them was licensed. (In some cases, those licenses were exclusive.)

This was in 1980.

Someone needs to brush up on their video game history.

And btw, look one title up from the one I linked, and you'll see NFL Football. Tecmo wasn't even the first licensed *football* game, much less all sports.

I'm not even saying Mattel's were either, but the point is at least one company was doing it a full nine years before Tecmo.

HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT

Let's see here...

I owned the original Madden Football for Apple II+ back in the day. Played that like crazy with my pops. I played Tecmo Bowl for years; freaking loved that game. Double Dribble? Another great classic. Arch Rivals? Check! Intellivision Baseball? For sure!

I played a lot of Bill Walsh College Football on SNES back in it's heyday and I also loved Coach K College Basketball on Genesis. This was when EA was actually making some good games. I even played the original "NBA Live" aka Celtics vs Lakers on a 7th grade's buddies PC... probably a 386 of sorts. Some good stuff back then.

Today? I attempt to play Madden '06 or NBA Live '06 and it's laughable at best. I'm currently playing College Hoops 2k6 on PS2.

I never played tecmo bowl... I must be only 1 of a handful of gamers to have missed out.

I think Suellentrop is wrong... there are derivative games out there- backyard football/soccer/basketball/baseball where you play with Mike Piazza as a kid, along with other kids to form your team & you don't play the Yankees. The intellivision game isn't an exact example of what Suellentrop is talking about, but it does show that licensing isn't in and of itself the devil- in the 80s there were games like Hardball and 4th and inches. Cyberball came out and was fun for a while. There were various NFL and MLB games in the arcades that utilized 2nd joysticks to control how far & where you threw a pass, or wielded a bat or threw a pitch.

And NFL Challenge by XOR predated Tecmo bowl by a few years.

blades of steel.

best sports game evah.

I am so glad publishers are getting liscensed sports games, because those sports titles from the 80s were too generic.

I like some of EA's titles, the Madden series. EA can't help if there product is the only one surviving.

-2K games seem to be fazing out the NFL 2k series.
-989 studios in recent years adopted sorry game developers and they're sports titles started to suck, that's why you see no more NFL GameDay series.
-Acclaim Entertainment went under last year in bankruptcy and there goes up in smoke the NFL Quarterback Club series, a series that was worthy to rival EA's.
-Midway is currently selling there latest football game Blitz: The League unliscensed by the NFL, and its getting sorry reviews. You know why? Because no body plays unliscense cheap imitation sports games anymore, there is no fun in those types of games.

Best baseball game is baseball simulator 1000, it has everything you need in a baseball game in regular league and then you move into the ultra league and the game just goes to the ridiculous stage, but still crazy good time. That game has caused about as much rage as that video of the guy playing halo 2 online.