Which game started it for you?
 

Happy Easter all. I just thought i'd ask what game started it for you in sports simulations. I don't so much mean arcade/console games but text sims. It could also be board or cards and dice games.

For me it was purchasing Strat-o-Matic baseball back in 1991. It came with the 1990 season and that was it for me. I was hooked. My first career sim was the amazing (at the time) One-Nil from Wizard Games. I played that game to death and still fire it up from time to time on my old 486. I can remember the awe that i felt when playing One-Nil that I could actually buy and sell players and that players would age, retire and develop their skills. At the time it was like nirvana for me.

How about you guys?

no question, MicroLeague Baseball.

Ahhh yes good old MicroLeague. Another classic game.

+1

Good thread question!

What started my interest in text sims was a vivid imagination as a boy that allowed me to endlessly create fantasy leagues. I would fill up entire notebooks with my fictional baseball, football, and basketball leagues. My first text sims were self-created, and I still play around with a world football league I created when the mood strikes me, keeping a record of past seasons and results to present day.

The first version of Baseball Mogul, I played that game all the time. Championship Manager soon followed.

MicroLeague baseball, then I went to the tabletop with statis pro and strat-o-matic, and then Baseball Mogul into the franchise type sims.

For me it was using strat-o-matic as a kid. I think I got it probably 1982 or 1983 right when the Braves were their best before their huge fall off. I remember playing it for a few years just playing though wishing the braves had made other moves (Such as not trading Brett Butler).

I remember my first computer version of anything of the sort was Earl Weaver baseball for my Tandy computer in the mid-80s at some point. I remember trying various similar games in the 90s as well such as Tony Larussa baseball, etc

What got me into modern sim-sports games was actually Celeval (from this board) back in the late 90s or so (before FOFC existed) got me hooked up with the early versions of Baseball Mogul and OOTP (I think OOTP was actually on OOTP2 then).. He was also the one who got me to try out Front office football when it came out as well.

Lance Hafner Pro Basketball on the C64. I remember writing a program in basic that showed the playoff brackets and stats.

The two that first stick into my mind are Tony La Russa Baseball and Omni-Play Basketball. I actually had the Magic Johnson branded version, but I think it was the same game. That was the first sports game I played that really had a strategic layer to it, and man I was impressed.

La Russa was the first one I become obsessed with. I went back and played Earl Weaver after that and was hooked.

I sort of stopped playing for a few years there though and didn't get back into it until Championship Manager 97/98, and I haven't stopped since then.

For me it was apba baseball and strat-o-matic baseball.

Actually now that I think about it I had a little electronic game that I played the hell out of long before I went into the PC gaming side of things.

I can't remember the name of it for the life of me, but it was a football game shaped like a little stadium, and you had playbooks and such. I only had the pro bowl teams from that year and you'd input plays and such and it had a cheezy little announcer that would tell you what happened.

I played the hell out of that thing, can't remember what it was called though.

Nice, I still have the LH Games on floppies.

Pro Basketball
Courtside College Basketball
3-in-1 Football
Full Count Baseball
Hat Trick Hockey
Rampage Wrestling.

I may have to fire them up for nostalgia purposes.

Omni Pro basketball had player aging and drafting if Im not mistaken.

Yeah it definitely did.

I seem to remember being able to play college and pro level also. It was pretty impressive.

Yeah, great times!

1969 APBA Baseball card set, during high school I played the he** out of that game, which has led to my current set of sports sim addictions.

Microleague Baseball, Front Page Sports Football.

Got Strat-O-Matic for Christmas in '75 ('74 season) when I was 11 years old and have been addicted ever since.

There was also this hockey sim, I can't remember the name. It was a career sim, probably in the early 90s. You'd start out as an expansion team and try to build them up. They had a basketball version as well. I think it had some really cheapo graphics as well.

Courtside College Basketball is one of my top five favorite games of all time. I also had 3-in Football and Full Count Baseball, but none were in the class of CCB to me.

Strat-o-matic got the ball rolling for me in the early '80s, then I found MicroLeague Baseball in 1985. Man oh man. Once I got the GM add-on disk that allowed you to create your own teams, it was all over. I got the Baseball Encyclopedia and create every team in Royals history and any other team I liked. I held several "all comer" tournaments where I put together a 256-team bracket and played it out. The first champion team was the 1963 Dodgers (they benefitted from my house rule of using three-man starting staffs for they tourney). MVP Sandy Koufax no-hit the '27 Yankees in the semifinals. Amazing.

It wasn't Superstar Ice Hockey by Mindscape was it?

Loved that game.

Andy fucking Dolphin's hockey game.

Front Page Sports Football, then Baseball.

If you don't count the games my brother and I made up using a deck of regular playing cards to get results than Strat-O-Matic Baseball was the beginning for me too. My first strat game was the 1969 season selector set which only included the Twins, Orioles, Braves, Miracle-Mets, and Cubs (couldn't talk Mom into buying me the version with all of the teams).

Played the hell out of that to the point of the cards almost having the consistency of toilet paper :D Then used my paper route money to buy my first full set of cards, the 1972 season and was in heaven. Bought every season set after that up into the mid 80's when I got my first c-64.

Played "Pure Stat Baseball" on the c-64 and moved onto Lance Hafner Baseball on my first pc along with a little "Earl". Like others here I also had Hafner 3-1 football and the college basketball game. Any of you guys ever subscribe to the Hafner news letter? Back in the day with no net it was kind of cool to get info and see that there were others out there that also had a love for sports gaming.

While the Internet has been a great thing for this particular hobby, does anyone actually long for an earlier day sometimes? I remember finding out about One-Nil among others from Mark Cohen's (I think) magazine of which I can't remember the name but I still have some back issues.

Nothing can match the excitement of placing an order by phone and waiting and checking the mail every day to see if the game had arrived. Same thing with my Strat-o-Matic board games, waiting for the courier to deliver it and then spending time seperating the cards...ahhh good times.

Baseball Mogul 99, but I don't recall how I found out about it, being that prior to that I was a sports console game junkie

Avalon Hill's Statis Pro Baseball (Commodore 64) ftw.

Late bloomer: not until Football Mogul in 2000.

FTW!

I loved that game. Forgot to add Wayne Gretzky Hockey as well (with Hockey League Simulator?)

I think the first game that really got me interested in season/career simulations was Pursue the Pennant, a pretty awesome baseball board/dice game.

From there, I went to Strat-o-Matic for my hockey fix.

From a computer perspective, definitely the Tony Larussa Baseball series was big for me when I first got a computer in university back in the early 90's and of course, Hockey League Simulator II teamed up with Wayne Gretzky Hockey.

Gosh, I spent so much time making rosters for those games...

Front Page Sports Baseball and Football got me completely hooked later in the 90s.

Great times...

Mark Cohen's magazine was Sports Game Review which he later changed to PC Sports and Games. Great magazine, only problem was they ended up giving every game 5 stars.

Got into the game late.

I joined a sim league that used High Heat Baseball in 2000, which eventually led to a couple of FPS Baseball leagues, and then eventually OOTP 3 and FOF 2001.

Super Sunday back on the C-64/128 as well as all of the expansions for the game.

The game kept stats, but for career stats etc....I had to print them out and compile them myself on paper. Also, players didn't age so I had to do that manually as well.

Loved that game though.

Cheers!

Completely forgot about Super Sunday. Had that for the Apple II. Fun game.

SSI's Computer Baseball

Obviously not as sophisticated as today's replay sims, but still pretty impressive for it's time in terms of what it tried to accomplish--I would imagine that things like simulating pitching usage and the opportunity to input your own teams would be something state of the art for a computer sim first published in 1981.

+1

Playing that incessantly on my old Apple IIc with its borderline-radioactive green screen monitor probably took a few years' worth of use off of my retinas.

The first text/card based sim was with a super old strat-o-matic baseball set. It was a card set from I believe the 50's (or maybe a little later, if Strat didn't exist then), but it was a set of old-time teams, so I had the '27 Yankees and some Washington Senators teams. Then for my 7th or 8th birthday I got the 1993 complete MLB set, which I played to death. I got most of the MLB sets until around '97.

My first text sim was Baseball Mogul, which was absolutely mind blowing to me.

Then I discovered strat-o-matic football, which was pretty fun as well.

The first game I remember was the table top game "NFL Strategy". That was the one where you had a bunch of cards for offensive and defensive plays. The offensive play cards had a bunch of numbers, and the defensive play cards had windows that would show certains numbers on the offensive cards. You loaded them into a slot on the right of the board, and "ran the play" by flicking a fishing bobber type things on a pole. Where ever the bobber ended up, you traced it over, and the window revealed showed the results of the play. The rest of the game board had a field and scoreboard that you would update with the results.

Me and my cousins used to play the hell out of this game. We'd keep logs and stats in a notebook. That was back in the late 70s, a definite pre-cursor to getting into the electronic realm.

Championship Manager 93/94.

1st sports game was a little handheld game that had like 3 little red lines running around. the top part was shaped like a stadium. Wore out tons of batteries on that. 1st real sports game was statis pro football 1985 season.loved it to death.

Whichever was earlier between Front Page Sports Football and the first Baseball Mogul.

I loved both those games and played the hell out of them.

That's the one. Yeah they were always pretty generous review wise but it was still a good mag. I still have some back issues somewhere.

There was a soccer game years back on my uncle's Atari that took half an hour to load every game from tape, but I was hooked. No idea what the name was, but for the time it was pretty cool (real players).

The first text sim I owned was Championship Manager 93/94, the first game I played the hell out of was Championship Manager 2. I must have logged 6 months of actual game time on that bad boy. God knows how my school work suffered. My life could have been so different if it wasn't for that game :)

In terms of US based sports, I got hooked on OOTP2 even though I had no idea what the rules of baseball were. A text sim actually taught me the rules of a game that I now really enjoy.

I also loved the Front Page Sports series. Heck, I even kept my copy of Front Page Sports Football '99 despite the recall. (I think it was the '99 version that got recalled anyways....)

Cheers!

I played a few soccer manager games on my C-64 before finding Championship Manager for the Amiga about 1990.. I remember having to have an extra 3.5" disk just for the saved game, and my buddy, who also loved soccer manager games, thought it was the worst game ever.. it was too slow, you needed the extra disk, the interface was terrible, but I was STUCK.. I can honestly say I've bought every CM/FM from the very beginning up until 2004, when I had experienced so many other textsims and found more interest in fictional sims and other sports than soccer.

We made up a simple game called hit and run that used 3 d6 and a chart that assigned an outcome to each roll. We played many seasons of that until we discovered fantasy baseball (I shoplifted the book when it first came out.) I had statis pro baseball but I think I was too young to figure it out.

I had Radio Baseball and Earl Weaver baseball for the Tandy and we played a ton of strat baseball and college football in study hall in high school. I didn't play sim games from probably '89 until I discovered FOF in 2000.

lol

48 posts and I'm the first to answer FOF?

Playing Paydirt! and Superstar Baseball with my dad (both tabletop games) was by far the most fun I had with board games growing up. They paved the way for countless leagues in Baseball Stars for the NES, then a league we made up for Super Play Action Football for the SNES where I kept all the stats and such on paper. Finally, TCY was what really got me in to "Text Sims."