Just as longtime football fans struggle to stop Lawrence Taylor from rushing through their minds every time Joe Theismann pops up on television (these days, to promote cures for a broken prostate), it has become equally hard for seasoned sports gamers to hold back thoughts of NFL 2K any time its old nemesis, Madden NFL, releases another hype trailer or holds another cover vote.

Forever, these football icons will be linked, primarily because of a privately cheered, publicly booed 2004 contract, in which the NFL (playing the role of Harry Carson) and Electronic Arts (standing in as the original L.T.) struck a long-term, exclusive partnership that effectively ended Visual Concepts' career in creating pro football videogames.

Even in an imaginary, less cutthroat world where league licenses couldn't become locked up in anti-consumer, exclusivity deals, these three companies' business ties would persist in the same way that TitanFall cannot evade Call of Duty comparisons, and Mighty No. 9 will never escape Mega Man's blue shadow.

Reason being, several years before the Madden series' most fearsome rival, NFL 2K, was successfully pitched to SEGA of America at a private, 3D technology demonstration, sports gamers were sitting around their Super Nintendos, slamming muddy 2D sprites into each other, while happily playing Madden NFL 94, developed by Visual Concepts.

Shockingly, the same Madden franchise that later became a bitter archrival to Visual Concepts' NFL 2K games also gave the young Californian software maker its first job programming football titles, back in 1993. In fact, if you had a Super Nintendo during it's heyday, most of the gray EA Sports cartridges for that system were coded by Visual Concepts. Bill Walsh College Football, MLBPA Baseball, Madden NFL 95 and NHL 95 were just some of the company's early entries in the sports genre.

Then came Madden NFL 96 for Sony's PlayStation – or more accurately, it didn't come, after the project was sacked for failing to meet Electronic Arts' quality assurance standards. That cancellation not only cost Electronic Arts an early foothold in the combative PlayStation sports market, where Madden would fight chiseled competitors like Sony's NFL GameDay and Midway's NFL Blitz, but it also cost Visual Concepts its football partnership with Electronic Arts, who awarded Madden NFL 97's development to an upstart, independent Florida-based studio named Tiburon Entertainment.
 

NHL 97 for the Sony PlayStation and SEGA Saturn was the final Visual Concepts game to be released by Electronic Arts. Without a publisher, Visual Concepts continued working on its own 3D technology in-house, eventually producing their next sports title, NBA Action 98 for the SEGA Saturn. This was the team's first release under the “SEGA Sports” brand, where Visual Concepts would remain until its 2005 sale to Take-Two Interactive.

NBA Action 98 failed to bring basketball buyers to SEGA's struggling Saturn console, but that result was just as expected in 1997 as a Jordan-led, Chicago Bulls championship, given the established dominance of Sony's sports powerhouse, the PlayStation, and its star hoops titles, NBA ShootOut and NBA Live. From Visual Concepts' perspective, NBA Action 98 at least succeeded in earning SEGA of America's trust. And when Electronic Arts began bargaining with SEGA over the exclusive rights to publish sports games on its upcoming Dreamcast console, president Bernie Stolar decided to let Electronic Arts walk away from the table, and instead, bet on Visual Concepts. Given that Madden NFL, NBA Live and EA NHL likely wouldn't have moved more units of SEGA's poorly marketed system than NFL 2K, NBA 2K and NHL 2K ultimately did, you could say that Stolar's bet paid off since the sports games SEGA did have were accounting for 46 percent of the company's yearly revenue by 2001. Unfortunately, the slim profit margins ($4 per unit sold) coming from a handful of licensed sports titles could not keep the ill-fated Dreamcast from folding, spurring SEGA's eventual exit from the sports genre.

NFL 2K

In all likelihood, there will never be another sports game as graphically and sonically stunning as the original NFL 2K. To many gamers' surprise, it wasn't Sonic The Hedgehog's first hard-to-control, horribly voice-acted 3D adventure, but instead, an American football game from a small, unheralded developer, that became the primary reason to pay $199.99 on 9/9/1999 for SEGA's Dreamcast.

At a time when Sony's NFL Gameday and Electronic Arts' Madden NFL series were just beginning to experiment with polygonal player models, while still featuring mostly empty sidelines surrounded by a single flat crowd texture, Visual Concepts' NFL 2K lined its fields with photographers, camera operators, reporters, coaches, and reserve players, along with individually modeled -- though heavily cloned -- fans filling the lower levels of its 3D stadiums. These details came at no cost to system performance, since the Dreamcast was capable of displaying everything at a sharp 480p, while still running at a smooth 60 frames per second, even during thick snow storms and pouring rain showers.

The game's hulking player models moved with a smoothness and believability never before seen in sports videogames, thanks to Visual Concepts' impressive use of over 1,500 motion-captured animations, mostly provided by real NFL players, like running back Ahman Green, defensive lineman Junior Bryant, offensive lineman Derrick Deese, defensive back Marquez Pope, et al. NFL 2K looked even better during its automated “Action Replays,” which zoomed in on finer details like mud-stained uniforms and players' misty breaths during cold-weather games.

NFL 2K sounded as incredible as it looked, thanks to the talented voice acting of Terry McGovern and Jay Styne, better known to gamers as the fictional commentary duo, Dan Stevens and Peter O'Keefe. Other impressive audio features included a public address announcer, fan chants, piped-in stadium music, audible athlete chatter and painful player grunts during high-impact collisions.

Visual Concepts even took advantage of the LCD screen inside the Dreamcast's multipurpose memory card, as gamers could press the tiny buttons on their Visual Memory Unit (VMU) to call plays during local multiplayer matches, without giving their opponent any hint of what play might be coming.

NFL 2K's main weakness was its lack of a multi-season “franchise” mode, a feature that had existed in PC sports games since 1992's Front Page Sports: Football, and had appeared for the first time on home consoles in EA Tiburon's NCAA Football 98. Franchise mode's absence was easily forgivable, though, since NFL 2K was showcasing so many graphical and audio advances, while facing the pressures of being a launch-day title for a new console that was utilizing an unusual, non-industry-standard chipset.

Commonplace customization tools like create-a-team, create-a-player and create-a-play were at least present, giving NFL 2K plenty of replayability. Play creation, sadly, is a feature that has gone missing from modern football games (Avatar Football is the odd exception), failing to appear in any Madden title since the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 editions of Madden NFL 09; even in that most recent instance, gamers had to also own NFL Head Coach 09 just to employ the feature in Madden NFL 09.

NFL 2K1

While sports games on the Super Nintendo, SEGA Genesis and SEGA Saturn had been able to go online using expensive, hard-to-find peripherals like XBAND and NetLink, NFL 2K1 marked the first time that console gamers could experience online play for free, without needing to buy extra accessories, and without any fear of costly long-distance charges or pricey service plans. Those latter circumstances, however, were not SEGA's doing, but instead, were the result of a timely boom in free dial-up ISPs like NetZero, Juno and BlueLight.

The SEGA Dreamcast's 56K modem (twice as fast as the Saturn's 28K NetLink) ran games surprisingly well, though obviously, not up to the broadband standards that a small percentage of sports gamers were enjoying on their computers (in the year 2000, just 3 percent of Americans had broadband Internet at home). Dreamcast owners at least had access to a SEGA-branded keyboard, which facilitated friendly communication and G-rated trash talk (profanities, to many teenagers' disappointment, automatically became asterisks). Today, many sports series allow only one person per system to join an online match; NFL 2K1, by contrast, let four players on one Dreamcast compete online against four players from another Dreamcast, creating exciting eight-player matches.
 

For gamers who preferred to face the computer, NFL 2K1 now included a multi-year franchise mode on-par with what football fans had been enjoying on older platforms. NFL 2K1's career mode supported fantasy drafts, as well as created players, though getting the latter to work required an arcane menu trick.

NFL 2K1's online functionality also meant that downloadable roster updates, which PC sports buffs had grown accustomed to receiving, could finally keep athletes' ratings and injuries accurate throughout the season.

To date, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is the only sports game to receive a higher Metacritic score (98) than NFL 2K1 (97).
 

NFL 2K2

Following SEGA's 2001 announcement that the company was preparing to discontinue its Dreamcast, football enthusiasts wondered whether or not the NFL 2K series would continue beyond its regular September release date, or simply retire alongside the Dreamcast. Thankfully, SEGA allowed Visual Concepts to transfer the series to the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, arriving in November and January, respectively, in the form of two rushed, unoptimized ports, which were both missing the Dreamcast's innovative online multiplayer capability.

Slightly updated graphics, marginally improved AI, and a few new player animations were the only noticeable additions to NFL 2K2, as Visual Concepts were scrambling to install their code base onto two new consoles, each running on entirely different architecture.
 

NFL 2K3

Turning on NFL 2K3, the first thing gamers saw was SportsCenter anchor, Dan Patrick, greeting them from his studio set, announcing a new partnership between SEGA Sports and ESPN.

Konami had previously owned ESPN's videogame rights from 2000 to 2002, but poor sales of sub-par titles like NBA 2Night and NFL PrimeTime caused the company to cease production on all their sports games, except for Pro Evolution Soccer, Pro Yakyuu Spirits and Power Pros, which still release annually to this day.

Aside from NFL 2K3's opening cinematic, Visual Concepts' initial collaboration failed to take full advantage of ESPN's most popular personalities, as a relatively unknown correspondent, Clark Dishman, provided blunt, bland voice-overs during his pre-game, half-time and post-game studio reports.

Dishman's weekly recap shows, though delivered dryly, were one of many noteworthy additions to NFL 2K3's franchise mode, which had undergone a complete cosmetic makeover. The menus, instead of being displayed against a traditional blank backdrop, were now surrounded by fake computer monitors and paper notebooks inside a virtual team facility. The head coach's office for the expansion Houston Texans, for example, had draft-day pictures of number-one overall pick David Carr hanging on the wall that faced your desk, where you'd order the team depth chart and manage player contracts. You could even move the Texans, or any other NFL team, for that matter, out of their default division and into the other conference, as franchise mode now supported team swapping. Visual Concepts also added a basic scouting system and a pre-draft combine for incoming rookies, plus they allowed college football die-hards to import their NCAA Football 2K3 draft classes, a series that was being farmed out to Avalanche Software, and would be asked to resign the following year, after suffering two straight seasons of financial losses.
 

NFL 2K3's most impressive upgrade was its graphics. By 2002's standards, the game's detailed player models looked extremely lifelike, from their shiny helmets, to the pad outlines pressing against their wrinkled mesh jerseys, all the way down to their chalky, studded cleats. Personalized faces and individualized accessories helped differentiate the cast of athletes, especially now that their faces were animated and could blend in seamlessly with the rest of the players' bodies, instead of looking painted-on like in past NFL 2K titles. If gamers didn't approve of a particular player's appearance, or didn't agree with an athlete's attribute ratings, Visual Concepts allowed every member of the current-day roster to be edited, for the first time in series history. Classic teams like the 1985 Chicago Bears and the 1989 San Francisco 49ers were also available, along with their throwback uniforms, but licensing restrictions prevented these retired players' real likenesses from being used, or from being manually edited into the game. Individual difficulty sliders for nine different AI actions (blocking, passing, running, etc.) did let users customize the CPU's potency in greater detail than before, as players were no longer stuck with a few all-encompassing difficulty settings.

In a year where GameDay and Madden were both testing out online play for the first time, Visual Concepts made sure to reinstall its network code for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox releases of NFL 2K3 (the GameCube version, which was NFL 2K's only appearance on Nintendo's "purple lunchbox," contained no online play). The Xbox edition even supported online voice chat thanks to Microsoft's progressive Xbox Live service. Years before online leaderboards became commonplace in videogames, NFL 2K3 tried a unique SEGA Sports Challenge stat system, which would read your user profile, track your in-game statistics, then spit out a code that could be entered on SEGA's website, where players could compare their profiles' single-game records and career averages.

Whereas NFL 2K, NFL 2K1 and NFL 2K2 had all been designed without any type of player momentum or footplanting, athletes in NFL 2K3 could no longer sprint off in any direction while still maintaining their top speed, as the game would now slow players down during sharp turns. ESPN NFL Football and NFL 2K5 would continue to tweak the franchise's player movement, making additional progress towards Visual Concepts' new goal of creating realistic footwork. Further realism was achieved by allowing gamers to select their defensive line stunts separately from their secondary's blitzes and coverages, a feature that still does not exist in any EA Tiburon football game. The ability to reassign offensive and defensive audibles by simply holding down the right trigger while inside the play-calling screen was another of NFL 2K3's excellent strategic additions.

On the flip-side, NFL 2K3 was just now implementing pre-play offensive hot routes (a feature that had debuted in Madden NFL 2000), allowing quarterbacks to change any receiver's assignment by simply pointing the right joystick in one of eight directions, and then pressing a receiver's icon to confirm the change. Requiring only two button presses, Visual Concepts' system was at least quicker and simpler than the three-button-press method that EA Tiburon continues to employ to this day. Additionally, while NFL 2K3 -- and all subsequent 2K football games -- gave gamers the option of setting a “one hot route per play” limit, no such option has ever existed Madden NFL or NCAA Football, allowing players in those games to unrealistically redraw entire plays at the line of scrimmage in a handful of seconds.
 

ESPN NFL Football

With its reputation for focusing on state-of-the-art graphics and fun, strategic gameplay, it felt slightly out of character when Visual Concepts began talking up fringe features like The Crib and a playable first-person camera -- additions seemingly designed to attract casual football supporters to SEGA's second-place NFL series. Other strange marketing decisions, like emphasizing the new ESPN branding by completely dropping the “2K” out of the title, and shipping with a goofy, blown-up box art that failed to show a single piece of sports equipment on the cover, likely did ESPN NFL Football no favors at retail, where it would become the lowest-selling NFL 2K of all-time, and the only entry besides NFL 2K2 to move less than a million units.

Contrary to common belief, ESPN NFL Football was not the first videogame to feature an in-helmet perspective; that honor belongs to Digital Pictures' Quarterback Attack With Mike Ditka, released on the SEGA Saturn in 1995 and the 3DO in 1996. Visual Concepts' fourth NFL 2K game, however, was the first time that players could control any position on the field, not just the quarterback, from a first-person view. It is fascinating to think how much better first-person football might play today, now that a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio is the industry norm, and virtual reality headsets like Sony's Project Morpheus and Facebook's Oculus Rift are beginning to unveil playable prototypes.

ESPN NFL Football's 32-team online leagues were equally innovative, as at the time, PC was the only gaming platform that had offered anything comparable (see 1993's Front Page Sports: Football Pro). Each league even came with its own website, where detailed game logs and season-long player stats were stored. Only PlayStation 2 players had access to these features, as Xbox owners would have to wait until ESPN NFL 2K5 to join the fun. Electronic Arts would not add online leagues to their console football titles until NCAA Football 09 and Madden NFL 10, respectively, and even by NCAA Football 14, Online Dynasties still remained limited to a maximum of 12 participants.
 

ESPN NFL Football was also the franchise debut of double-team blocking, which could happen at any time, in any blocking situation. EA Tiburon, by comparison, did not fully implement double-team blocking into their running game until the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of NCAA Football 10 (NCAA Football 08 had double-team blocks, but only on stretch and zone runs); additionally, double-team pass blocking did not exist in any Tiburon title until the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One editions of Madden NFL 25.

New secondary shifts were placed on the right joystick, so that gamers could tell their defensive coverage to press, bait, or shade receivers to the inside/outside. On-the-fly substitutions allowed you to spell a tired running back or sit an exhausted defensive end directly from the play-calling screen, without having to stop the game and sift through multiple pause menus.

Franchise mode's biggest change again involved its weekly highlight show, which had ditched the dull monotone of Clark Dishman for the enthusiastic antics of Chris Berman. Visual Concepts also added the ability to export your franchise team for use in outside game modes, something that still isn't possible in Madden NFL's Connected Careers.

The less said about The Crib, where gamers wandered through a 3D house filled with trophies, posters, and interactive bar games, the better. Though it certainly holds some historical significance as the starting point of Visual Concepts' fetish for drip-feeding its customers meaningless virtual currency in exchange for silly unlockables. At least Jackass alumnus, Steve-O, and former WCW World Heavyweight Champion, David Arquette, hadn't been invited to join the game, yet.

ESPN NFL 2K5

After ESPN NFL Football failed to grab Joe Gamer's attention with its flashy list of marketable features, ESPN NFL 2K5 drew the franchise's largest audience to date (selling three times as much as the next closest 2K football game), by letting the product's $20 price point, positive word-of-mouth and continued critical praise sell itself, while the developers quietly focused on adding small, supplemental features and making minor improvements to existing areas of the game.

Chris Berman, for example, now appeared as an animated 3D model –- complete with accurately rendered, atrocious-looking comb-over -- instead of only being heard as an invisible, disembodied voice. On the Xbox, Berman's in-game summaries now showed video replays, instead of being limited to still screen shots. The self-appointed Swami also had a post-game report this year, whereas before, he was only given pre-game and half-time spots.

In ESPN NFL 2K5's weekly highlights show (now named “SportsCenter,” not “NFL PrimeTime”), Chris Berman was joined by Trey Wingo, who would detail key injuries and transactions. During the off-season editions of SportsCenter, Mel Kiper Jr. would even show up to analyze incoming draft prospects. These three contrasting personalities helped create the most realistic newscasts in sports gaming history.
 

As a marketing tie-in with ESPN's 25th anniversary, Visual Concepts recreated 25 classic NFL moments, from the Ice Bowl's game-winning, over-the-pile touchdown plunge, to Donovan McNabb's improbable 4th and 26 conversion, which helped put the Philadelphia Eagles into their third consecutive NFC Championship game.

On the field, a smartly designed defensive hot route system helped gamers quickly alter individual defenders' assignments, without the need to slowly scroll their player cursor across the screen, as is still required in EA Tiburon's football titles. Stadium authenticity could even be improved by importing music clips from your hard drive and cuing them to play during key moments, like after a touchdown or a quarterback sack.

Virtual Identity Profiles (V.I.P.s) now mirrored the playcalling and gameplay tendencies for every NFL coach in the game, and for each of your real-world friends, making it so that no two opponents played the same style, while under the computer's control. Brian Billick would look to protect his unproven quarterback, Kyle Boller, by repeatedly handing the ball off to workhorse running back, Jamal Lewis. Mike Martz, even without Kurt Warner, would still try to air the ball out to Torry Holt and Isaac Bruce.
 

Game Over?

So the NFL 2K series ended, like the careers of many NFL stars from the past, present and future, tragically incapacitated at the height of its fame and glory.

There was a comeback attempt, as there often is. And while it wasn't an Adrian Peterson-esque return to dominance, it was at least on-par with Joe Montana's Kansas City Chiefs years, which despite one Pro Bowl and two playoff appearances, most people prefer to forget.

For the final chapter of Visual Concepts' football legacy, Operation Sports takes a long look at the controversial All-Pro Football 2K8.