Sports game

A sports game is a computer or video game that simulates the playing of traditional sports. They are extremely popular, the genre including some of the best-selling games.

Almost every familiar sport has been recreated with a game, including baseball, soccer, American football, boxing, cricket, golf, basketball, ice hockey, tennis, bowling, rugby, hunting, fishing, etc.

Some games emphasize actually playing the sport (such as the Madden NFL series), while others emphasize the strategy behind the sport (such as Championship Manager). Others satirize the sport for comic effect (such as Arch Rivals). This genre has been popular throughout the history of video games and is extremely competitive, just like real-world sports.

A number of games series feature the names and characteristics of real teams and players, and are updated annually to reflect real-world changes.

The genre is not to be confused with electronic sports, which is used to describe computer and video games which are played as competitive sports.

Types of sports games

Arcade

Sports games have traditionally been very popular arcade games. The competitive nature of sports lends itself well to the arcades where the main objective is usually to obtain a high score. The arcade style of play is generally more unrealistic and focuses on a quicker gameplay experience. Examples of this include the NFL Blitz and NBA Jam series.

Simulation

In comparison to arcade sports games, the simulation style of play is a usually a more realistic rendition of the real-life sport it emulates. Examples include the Madden NFL series and the NBA Live series.

Management

Sports management games put players into the role of team manager. Whereas fantasy games are often played online against other players, management games usually pit the player against AI controlled teams. Players are expected to handle strategy, tactics, transfers, and financial issues.

Fantasy

A Fantasy sport is a game where fantasy owners build a team that competes against other fantasy owners based on the statistics generated by individual players or teams of a professional sport.

History

Beginnings of sports games

One of the first video games in history, Tennis for Two (1958), was a sports game.

Computer games prior to the late 1970s were primarily played on university mainframe computers under timesharing systems that supported multiple computer terminals on school campuses. The two dominant systems were the Digital Equipment PDP-10 and the Control Data Corp. PLATO System. These systems displayed no graphics, only text. In the early 1970s they printed the text on teletype machines and line printers, but by the mid-seventies the text printed on single-color CRT screens.

Highlights of this era in sports games include:

Baseball (1971 — Written by Don Daglow at Pomona College, Baseball was the first computer baseball game, now recorded in the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. He continued to expand and refine Baseball throughout the 1970's, and its sabermetric approach provided the foundation for Daglow's later commercial games Intellivision World Series Baseball (1983, with Eddie Dombrower), Earl Weaver Baseball (1988, also with Dombrower), Tony La Russa Baseball (1991 through 1996) and Old Time Baseball (1995).

In the late 1970s arcade games began to appear, and sports were a popular genre. Highlights of this era include:

The first racing game was Night Driver (1976).

Atari Golf (1978),

1980's

Between 1980 and 1984 Atari and Intellivision waged a series of high-stakes TV advertising campaigns promoting their respective systems during the first round of console wars. Atari normally prevailed in arcade games and had a deeper installed base due to its lower price, while Mattel's Intellivision touted its visually superior sports games. Sports writer George Plimpton was featured in the Intellivision ads, which showed the parallel games side by side. Both Atari and Mattel fielded at least one game for baseball, football, hockey, basketball, auto racing and soccer.

Activision Tennis (1981)

Track & Field (1982)

Pole Position (1982).

In 1983 EA produced their first sports game Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One on One by Eric Hammond, which was also the first licensed sports game based on the names and likenesses of famous athletes. The game was a major hit.

In 1983 Mattel released Intellivision World Series Baseball by Don Daglow and Eddie Dombrower, the first game to use multiple camera angles to show the action. Games prior to this displayed the entire field on screen, or scrolled across static top-down fields to show the action. IWSB mimicked television baseball coverage by showing the batter from a modified "center field" camera, showing baserunners in corner insets, and showing defensive plays from a camera behind home plate. It was also the first sports game to introduce players with spoken words (as opposed to text) using the Mattel Intellivoice module. It received limited distribution due to the video game crash of 1983, and today is one of the most rare and expensive Intellivision cartridges on the collectibles market.

In 1984 game designer Scott Orr founded GameStar, a game publisher specializing in Commodore 64 sports games, and served as lead designer. GameStar was the most successful sports game company of its era, and Orr sold the company to Activision in 1986. The company's titles included:

On Court Tennis (1984)
Championship Baseball (1984)
GFL Championship Football (1985) -- American Football
Star Rank Boxing (1985)
Gamestar Basketball Association (GBA) Championship Basketball - Two-on-Two (1986)
Star Rank Boxing II (1987)
Top Fuel Eliminator (1987)
Face Off! (1987)

In 1988 EA released Earl Weaver Baseball by Don Daglow and Eddie Dombrower, which for the first time combined a highly accurate sim game with a high quality graphical action-style game. This was also the first game in which an actual baseball manager provided the computer AI. In 1996 Computer Gaming World named 'EWB to the #25 position on its list of the Best 150 Games of All Time, the second highest ranking for any sports game in that 1981-1996 period (after FPS Sports Football).

In 1989, Anco published Kick Off; it was immediately considered the pioneer of computer soccer games due to its many original features.

1990s

16-bit systems

The Creation of EA Sports -- In 1989 EA producer Richard Hilleman hired Gamestar's Scott Orr to re-design John Madden Football, then a disappointing Apple II game, for the fast-growing Sega Genesis. Orr and Hilleman together developed the game that we still recognize today as Madden Football, the best-selling title in the history of games in North America. They focused on producing a great head-to-head two-player game with an intuitive interface and responsive controls. When the game shipped it immediately became a major hit.

Orr joined EA full-time in 1991 after the success of Madden on the Genesis, and began a ten-year period of his career when he personally supervised the production of Madden Football. During this time Hilleman, Orr and their EA teams also created the following EA Sports hits, each of which was updated annually:

NHLPA Hockey
NCAA Football
Andretti Racing
NASCAR Racing (later called NASCAR Thunder)
Knockout Kings

Sensible Software's Sensible Soccer (1992) still retains a cult following today. The 16-bit era also saw the launch of many of the EA Sports sports franchises, including the FIFA, NHL, NBA Live and Madden NFL series.

32-bit / 64-bit systems The arrival of Sony's PlayStation and 3D graphics cards on the PC enabled sports games to make the leap into 3D. Actua Soccer was the first soccer game to make use of a 3D engine.

On PC

In 1995 Sierra released FPS Sports Football. The next year Computer Gaming World named it to the #12 position on its list of the Best 150 Games of All Time, the highest ranking for any sports game in that 1981-1996 period.

Extreme sports enters into the mainstream

Sports gaming becomes big business

On 13 December 2004, Electronic Arts began a string of deals that granted exclusive rights to several prominent sports organizations, starting with the NFL. This was quickly followed with two deals in January securing rights to the AFL and ESPN licenses. This was a particularly hard blow to Sega, the previous holder of the ESPN license, who had already been affected by EA's NFL deal. As the market for football brands was being quickly taken by EA, Take-Two Interactive responded by contacting the Major League Baseball Players Association and signing a deal that granted exclusive third-party major-league baseball rights; a deal not as restrictive, as first-party projects were still allowed. The NBA was then approached by several developers, but declined to enter into an exclusivity agreement, instead granting long-term licenses to Electronic Arts, Take-Two Interactive, Midway Games, Sony, and Atari. In April, EA furthered its hold on football licensing by securing rights to all NCAA football brands.

Games and televised sports

More and more, video sports games are starting to look and act like their TV counterparts. Additionally, televised sports, namely American football, have added Madden-style cameras to their coverage, further blurring the line between fantasy and reality. Sports commentators will often play a game of Madden Football before a big game (such as the Super Bowl), to help gain insight on the outcome.

There is also the Madden curse.

Sports games today

The sports genre is currently dominated by EA Sports and 2K Sports, who hold licenses to produce games based on official leagues. EA's franchises include the FIFA Soccer series, the NBA Live series, the Madden Football series, the NASCAR series and Tiger Woods series. All of these games feature real leagues, competitions and players. These games continue to sell well today despite many of the product lines being over a decade old, and receive, for the most part, consistently good reviews. EA Sports' Need for Speed series continues to be one of the best-selling in the racing genre, although it is not based on a license.

With EA Sports' domination, the market has become very difficult to enter; competing games in any of the above genres, with the exception of racing games, tend to be unsuccessful. This has led to a sharp drop in sports-themed titles over recent years. One of the most notable exceptions is Konami's ISS Evolution Soccer series, which is often hailed as an alternative to the FIFA series, but does not contain licensed teams, players, kits, or competitions. Racing games, due to the variation that the sport can offer in terms of tracks, cars and styles, offer more room for competition and the selection of games on offer has been considerably greater. Sports management games, while not as popular as they used to be, live on through small and independent software development houses. Management titles today have transitioned to the very popular fantasy sports leagues, which are available through many websites such as Yahoo.

Nintendo has been able to make an impact upon the sports market by producing several Mario-themed titles, such as Super Mario Strikers and Mario Tennis. These titles sell respectfully, but are only available on Nintendo's video game console, the GameCube.

The fantasy element

Some sports games are based on fictional sports, usually of a fantasy or science fiction nature. One of the most notable examples of this is the Speedball series; Speedball 2 was a huge success, particularly on the Commodore Amiga. Bearing some similarities to Team handball, the game introduces a number of futuristic gadgets that affect the gameplay immensely. Brutality is permitted; it is considered legal and acceptable to bash opponents with a metal ball. A number of sports have received the sci-fi treatment over the years, most frequently in the racing genre. F-zero popularized the futuristic racing genre, and was followed by a number of sequels.

A number of games introduce fantasy elements to existing sports, subtle or otherwise, to add comedic effect to a game, such as Brutal Sports Football, released by Millennium in 1992. Like Speedball, the game was inspired by American football, but placed a larger focus on injuring, maiming, and even killing opponents. It is possible to win a match by simply decapitating the entire opposing team.

In some titles contained within this extended genre, the fantasy element is less prominent, particularly in titles such as Ready 2 Rumble and Outlaw Golf &mdash games that, while strategically true to the sport, introduce comedy elements that would not realistically be seen in a serious simulation. For example, in Outlaw Golf, the choice of characters includes a stripper, a rapper, a Latin American Casanova-style figure and a mad scientist. Golf balls leave trails of smoke and fire when hit hard and the game features an over-enthusiastic and sarcastic commentator.