The History of Football Gaming

[fistofrage]

Quote: Originally Posted by daflyboys

I know we're talking primarily about electronic video games, but I want to mention 4 football games I and some other 40+ crowd might remember, pre-dating the electronic/virtual era: * Electric Football: occupied hours and hours of gameplay, primarily all of the crazy unrealistic formations you could do.... oh and don't forget, turn the vibration knob up: EARTHQUAKE!!!!! Also, needed to keep a lot of Q-tips around.... cutting off the ends made great substitute footballs when the originals were lost or too beat up to play with. * Mattel's Talking Football: This game was it! 10 offensive play recordettes (smaller than coasters), each with 6 defensive formations on the back. You had a special player device that would give a voice play-by-play of the record (depending on what play was picked and what defense formation was the chosen). There were also 3 specialty discs for situations that might result from a given play: fumble, INT, kickoff, etc. Very cool game for it's time and I still have a working copy of this..... maybe I'll stick it on Ebay sometime....lol Anybody remember any of these?

Don't get me started on electric football. That game was great. I logged probably over 1000 hours of electric football growing up.

Mattel's talking football....All I remember is the "Gadget play" disc..It's a gadget play, end around........Touchdown!.

[daflyboys]

Quote: Originally Posted by fistofrage

Don't get me started on electric football. That game was great. I logged probably over 1000 hours of electric football growing up. Mattel's talking football....All I remember is the "Gadget play" disc..It's a gadget play, end around........Touchdown!.

Well, let's face it. Electric Football was THE only 3D game around. And as far as the best play announcement in Talking Football was when you'd pop in the Interception disk after one was called during a regular play, just waiting to hear that: "A LEAPING INTERCEPTION....HE'S GOING TO GO ALL THE WAY....TOUCHDOWN!!"

[rollinphat]

what about playing this?
talk about HOURS of fun

[Rickster101]

Quote: Originally Posted by rollinphat

what about playing this? talk about HOURS of fun

I had one of these talk about addictive,carried this thing around everywhere the hand held of its day for Football guys and sport fans alike thats was made by Mattel I think and they had a complete sports lineup with those tiny blips.



Holla Back y'all
Rickster101

[daflyboys]

Here are the games I referenced above:

[Tomahawk]

I had the Electric Football, but I got one of them that had the real teams and the number stickers you could put on the players. I remember getting a Street & Smith so I could get each team's numbers right. A friend of mine actually had all 28 teams in the early 80's. Spentless countless hours playing Electric Football and the hand held game with the blip by Coleco.

Also, I actually played the first Atari football game which was pretty terrible with 3 players on each side.......they had a baseball game that worked the same way with 3 players.

[coogrfan]

A couple more board games from back in the day:




NFL STRATEGY-Tudor Games
This was the best of the pure strategy titles (no real teams). Very realistic (for example, play results were influenced by which hashmark the ball was on at the snap), this game was both an excellent learning tool and a superb battle of wits.


PAYDIRT - SI/Avalon Hill
This was my personal favorite, I must have played it literally thousands of times growing up. Imo this was the best of the sim-type games because it combined relatively simple game mechanics with realistic results. My friends and I would each take a team and play entire seasons, using the actual NFL schedule from the year in question (we used the real world results for any teams we weren't using). AH would offer updated charts each year for the previous season, I wound up with sets from 1977 until 1990. Sadly, AH went out of business, but there a still some hardcore Paydirt fanatics out there who produce homemade team charts. An all-time classic.

[daflyboys]

Actually the first "virtual" cpu football game I ever played was at college which must've been some early DOS program. It was all text and I guess random results occured based on what type of play you picked/typed in. Below is a re-inactment of the most exciting play result:


TOUCHDOWN!


Yep, that was about it. lol