When starting a hall of fame for sports gaming it means sifting through 25 plus years of games, series, athletes and much more in order to determine which were the very best of the best. This involves determining which games have had the phenomenal gameplay, have been innovative, as well as being able to stand the test of time.

Our first game being introduced into the Sports Game Hall of Fame is a game that has easily done all of these three things, and a game that undoubtedly dominated the youth of any sports gamer who had a Nintendo, Tecmo Super Bowl.

When Tecmo Super Bowl was released in 1991 it was the sequel to the popular game Tecmo Bowl which started in the arcades in 1987 and then appeared in homes two years later on the NES. The NES game featured 12 teams in a game of 9 on 9 football with 21 players on each roster. Tecmo Super Bowl’s release took the series to new heights giving users the option to play as any of the 28 NFL teams and upgrading rosters to 30 players each, giving gamers the ability to sub in players off the bench, and of course increasing number of players on the field at a time to the actual 11 on 11.

While from an outsider’s perspective you might think that adding two additional players onto the field might be the biggest change in the game, it wasn’t. The most noteworthy improvement overall for the series was adding season mode where you could pick any of the 28 teams and run a full NFL season with them including bye weeks and the playoffs. What was remarkable about Tecmo Super Bowl’s season mode was that it did full stat tracking for both teams and players, something that was truly revolutionary at the time. The stat tracking was also one of the things that added the greatest amount of replay value to the game. Who didn’t enjoy seeing how many yards they could rack up in a season with Bo Jackson or Christian Okoye? Or seeing the Montana to Rice connection lead to staggering numbers in passing and receiving.

While playing against the CPU was always fun, it was pretty much a forgone conclusion that you were going to win the game. The statistics are what allowed people to continue to enjoy pounding on the CPU. It was possible to still get a sense of accomplishment out of your victory because you got to see what kind of sickening numbers you could run up on the CPU: winning by 80 points in a game, rushing for over 500 yards, racking up 15 sacks in a game, or whatever other challenge you might set up for yourself before a game.

Tecmo Super Bowl was the most ground breaking sports title that I think we’ve seen in any sports game, possibly in any game period. Season mode with stat tracking was simply the tip of the iceburg of the many great innovations that Tecmo Super Bowl gave football gaming. Many of the features in the game were things that we wouldn’t end up seeing for ten or more years in other football games.

A great example of this would be the in game player progression where players ratings would actually improve during the course of the game depending on how he was doing during that game. Injuries to players was another, some of this injuries could cause players to miss multiple games or could even end their season. I know I restarted my NES on a few occasions when I saw a big name player go down to injury, however when I did suffer through an injury there was nothing like seeing him run back from the hospital just in time for the game.

Tecmo Super Bowl also featured coach mode which allowed you to take the roll of a coach calling plays. In coach mode you could sit and smile as you watched your players carry out the play just as you had imagined it, or watch your QB miss a player down field while you helplessly throw your controller in disgust. With all of these great innovations to football gaming what might be most impressive is that it boasted all of this while having gameplay that was simple enough for people to pick up and play instantly, and yet deep enough to have us continue to play the game 17 years later.

By simply resting on the features listed thus far, a spot could be cleared out in the Sports Gaming Hall of Fame for Super Tecmo Bowl. But what truly cemented Tecmo Super Bowl’s place in gaming history was the multiplayer matchups that all of us have had with others over the years. I dare to say that I believe there have been games and rivalries so intense that friendships have been torn apart or damaged beyond repair from these battles in Tecmo.

While this may sound extreme, I know that personally playing this game with friends we would have to schedule this to be the last thing that we did at the end of the afternoon. Once we got going in Tecmo it was not going to stop, and at the end one of us was going to be bitter about the final outcome. The game gave us matchups of epic proportion such as the Eagles versus the Raiders, sporting the legends of the game like Bo Jackson or QB Eagles; yet it allowed us to duke it out in the battle of the bottom dwellers like the Bucs vs. the Saints; or when times called for it you could slap your opponent in the face by beating his Niners with the Patriots. No matter what teams were selected the games could always be exceptional.

These battles in Tecmo Super Bowl are not just a thing of the past either, the game has truly stood up to the test of time. It’s one of the few games that can make it’s return 17 years later with gameplay and graphics nearly identical to its former self and have people salivating to get their hands on it, as some are with Tecmo Super Bowl: Kickoff. In fact there are some that are still not through with the original game as you can find many communities of people on the internet still playing against one another online using roms of the classic version, as well as the original game with updated players.

To this day I have still played far more hours of Tecmo Super Bowl than any other game that has ever pulled me into an arcade or entered one of my consoles. Tecmo Super Bowl was the most ground breaking, ahead of it’s time, and flat out fun game of any football game to date and that is why I am proud to see it enter today as the very first individual game in the Operation Sports’ Sports Gaming Hall of Fame.