If The Golf Club was a wrestling federation, it would be mid-1990s ECW. Both products were born from and designed around the belief that the status quo in their respective industries had become stale and antiquated.

For ECW, its deviations from the norm included three-way and four-way dances, letting every imaginable foreign object into the ring, and getting rid of disappointing, anti-climactic endings, such as count-outs, disqualifications, time-limit expirations, and wimpy schoolboy pinfalls. The company chose to let one man, Joey Styles, broadcast the match commentary all by himself, calling each move and hold by its real name, instead of having three cornball announcers cracking lame jokes and labeling every suplex variation a "throw."

As great as the wrestling was, ECW matches were also notable for how they interacted with and responded to the fans, instead of ignoring their chants, confiscating their signs, and keeping the action confined to the ring, to avoid any potential lawsuits. The creative team encouraged every ECW wrestler to improvise his or her interviews, instead of forcing athletes to recite lines that were being penned by ex-Hollywood screen writers. This process spawned believable characters like The Sandman and Raven -- the kind of seedy, miserable anti-heroes you were more likely to see fighting on the street after last call outside a dilapidated Philadelphia slum than appearing on commercials every Saturday morning during Warner Bros. cartoons.

Just as promoter Paul Heyman had to leave WCW -- “Where the big boys play!” -- and assume creative control of his own company before reaching his potential in the wrestling business, the developers behind The Golf Club, HB Studios, had to quit making "Legacy Edition" ports for EA Sports before the tiny Nova Scotian dev. team could begin achieving sports gaming greatness.
 

For The Golf Club, HB Studios' new spin on a familiar pastime (they coded the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable versions of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10) centers on avoiding the financial trap that league licensing often creates for smaller sports titles. Understanding their lack of box-art pedigree, HB Studios chose to debut its greener-than-grass golfing simulator as a $35 digital download, instead of immediately taking on the formidable costs of manufacturing and shipping a $60 boxed game to hundreds of Walmarts and GameStops.

Rather than hiding the game's shortcomings behind carefully worded press releases and zoomed-in, highlight-reel trailers, HB Studios let PC gamers play a work-in-progress STEAM Early Access build of The Golf Club months before its official release, so that fans could help accelerate its improvement during development. Like most of the self-published games in STEAM's locker room, The Golf Club has embraced and promoted user-generated content, letting its players publish custom courses that sit alongside the game's default collection.

Recent console releases from super-publishers like Take-Two Interactive and Electronic Arts, by contrast, have blocked users from adding any new content to their titles, unless players purchase costly, corporate-made downloadable content. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14's 14-course DLC pack, for example, was a $40 addition to a $60 game. For just $35, The Golf Club offers an evergreen service that can be readily updated, without needing to be remarketed and rereleased every 12 months with a different number next to its name.

While other sports games are paying multiple programmers to build boring tutorials and silly skills training minigames that most players just skip past, The Golf Club simply has one team member -- who also serves as the in-game announcer -- posting instructional videos to YouTube.

The group's efficient planning is also evident in The Golf Club's present feature set, which has prioritized popular social and competitive multiplayer modes over the old-fashioned offline solo experience.

Perhaps most impressively, HB Studios has created the rare type of sports game in which user skill (alone) will determine who wins and who loses every match; the outcome of tournaments and head-to-head bouts is never tilted by who picked the higher-rated team, who spent the most money opening virtual card packs, who equipped the best attribute-boosting gear, or whose character has grinded out the most experience points. In The Golf Club, the only way to get ahead of your peers is to get better at playing golf.

In the coming months, fans will see if HB Studios' innovative approach to producing sports titles pays off, or if -- like ECW -- The Golf Club becomes another niche passion project that couldn't turn a profit. The game's sales data hasn't been publicized yet, but after six days on the PlayStation Network store, it holds a four-star customer rating and has 332
unique "thumbs up." Little Brook Manor, the most-played course on The Golf Club's PS4 leaderboards, shows only 3,000 completed rounds. Electronic Arts' NHL 15 demo, which also arrived on the PlayStation 4 last Tuesday, has a five-star rating and over 4,000 thumbs up, by comparison. On HB Studios' official forums, a passionate following has at least developed, much like the recurring crowd of smarks and misfits who used to fill the ECW Arena.