You would be hard pressed to find someone who knows anything about hockey who would also be willing to argue that we're not in a golden age of EA NHL games. By nearly universal accounts, we are enjoying a series that is technically innovative and superior to the efforts of old. NHL 11, which released last Tuesday, brings to the table a finely tuned physics engine and enough new features to keep the avid puck fan salivating.

To understand and fully appreciate how we got here though, one has to look back on the legacy of the NHL franchise.

My experience with video game hockey goes all the way back to the original Nintendo-era game Hockey. Any gamer worth his/her salt -- and over the age of 25 -- is no doubt fully aware of this game. It was clunky, a little strange, but all in all, surprisingly compelling. But, in the end, its version of virtual hockey was lacking as a whole.

The life of this video game hockey fan was quite sparse until late in 1994. Now, some will put NHL 94 in the upper echelon, but '94 was the year for me that the EA hockey franchise took a giant, impressive leap in terms of quality. I still remember the day I got my hands on a copy of NHL 95. I popped that thing into my Sega Genesis and did not hit the power button again until I had to go to school the next day. Somehow, after all those years, I can't forget falling asleep in my eighth-grade history class and dreaming about virtual Mark Messier slapping a shot into the back of Pittsburgh's net.

That game, and NHL 96, took the platform to a whole new level. With '95, gamers were able to play entire seasons with their favorite teams and compete for the most coveted trophies in the sport. To aid them was a varied arsenal of moves and tricks, the likes of which we had never enjoyed before. My personal favorite, and oft-used play, was the drop pass. I used to whip Messier through crowds of defenders and drop the puck back, just as he overcommitted to the goal, to Brian Leetch, who, more often than not, found his way past the disoriented goalie.

The point is, I can still wax nostalgic, 15 years later. There's something to those games, something intrinsically magical that made every exhibition and every season played that much more compelling. There seemed an infinite number of situations that could arise in any given game. Each and every one of the body checks, whether out on the open ice or against the unforgiving boards, looked and felt as unique as they would in a flesh and blood contest.

A couple of months ago I was thinking about NHL 95. I had just finished off a season in NHL 10, and my New York Rangers had just lost in the Eastern Conference Finals to those same damned Pittsburgh Penguins. The loss reminded me of one I had suffered all those years ago. Then I got to wondering if the game, a distinctly 2-D affair, would hold up in the modern age of photorealistic animations.

I got online and downloaded an emulator so I could turn my laptop into a Sega Genesis. From the opening screen, I was hooked all over again. I got on there and picked my glorious Rangers and, for retribution sake, picked the Penguins for the other side. A few seconds later, and it was as real and present as ever. It was me and the world champion Rangers, skating our way through the persistent defense and trying like hell not to let Super Mario Lemieux put one past Mike Richter.

At one point, tied at two goals apiece, I was lucky enough to get a breakaway with Messier, who skated skillfully up the gut of the ice and past the Pittsburgh defense. I deked left, I deked right, and I could see a couple of black and gold wings closing in by now. When all hope of taking a lead seemed to dim, I made out a blue and red avatar racing to join the fray. Sure as the sun rising in the morning, it was Leetch coming to the rescue. So, I did what came natural: I hit the button for a burst of speed and overcommitted toward the goal right before telling virtual Messier to make a drop pass. And, sure enough, I was home.


Jared Sexton works as a professor of English for Ball State University. When he isn't talking about video games, he's writing stories that appear in magazines and journals around the country.