The Front Page Sports series was notable for being one of the first football simulations to include a career mode where players aged and retired, and for the number of statistics it offered.
The game divides itself into three separate, but directly connected, sections: on-field action, coaching playbook, and team management.
Rosters and player management featured 47-man teams, complete with injured reserve, free agent pools, drafting, training camp, and trading.
Using standard VCR-style controls, you can easily view, edit, and save pivotal plays as a highlight film.
The commissioner would run the simulation and then return updated files to owners (typically via a web page) for the next week of play.
Team owners could trade players with each other, make roster moves, and function as if they were real general managers.
Several of the new issues in the '98 version included a mix-up in the second-half kickoff if the coin-toss winner chose to kick; the game crashing when switching to certain camera angles; and erroneous features like the wrong type of turf in some of the stadiums.
The Front Page Sports series in fact were still using primarily the same graphics and player animations as in the past two releases.
Despite the efforts of Sierra Entertainment to improve upon these areas, the graphics and audio aspects of the game were inferior to the Madden NFL franchise.
The announcement was made via a post on the Football Pro '99 user forum at Sierra's web site, where president Dave Grenewetzki explained the reasoning behind the decision to cancel the title: "On February 22, 1999, Sierra announced a reorganization of its development divisions to more keenly focus on its key products.
Although most of the actions we took were to help us focus our resources on key products, the decision that affected the future of Football Pro was significantly different.
Based on that, we made some positive changes to the management and composition of the team and set them off on a path to create a series of patches to the ’99 product during development of a plan for a full release of Football Pro 2000 later in the year.
Unfortunately, the schedule they outlined didn’t give us a solid chance to have the right game for the intended Football Pro 2000 release, even with an additional seven to eight months of development.
Although discontinuing the line today is not a popular decision among Football Pro customers, I am not interested in repeating mistakes of the past.
Additional announcements will be made for resolving outstanding return and reparation issues for members of the Football Pro Home Team by Thursday, March 4.
Football Pro 99 was recalled on January 21, 1999, and the Home Team was established for customers that chose to keep their version of the product.
[8] Although the Front Page Sports Football line died an ugly death, the influence of the series lingered.
In addition to the way that it forced EA Sports to adopt management options in the Madden NFL series, it spawned a host of imitators.
Without Dynamix and Sierra Entertainment bringing franchise play and serious stat-crunching to the masses, games like Front Office Football and Action!