Sports video game
A number of game series feature the names and characteristics of real teams and players, and are updated annually to reflect real-world changes.
This is especially true in games about American football such as the Madden NFL series, where executing a pass play requires six different gameplay modes in the span of approximately 45 seconds.
[3] Older 2D sports games sometimes used an unrealistic graphical scale, where athletes appeared to be quite large in order to be visible to the player.
[17] Tomohiro Nishikado's four-player Pong variant Soccer was released by Taito in November 1973,[16][18] with a green background to simulate an association football playfield[19] along with a goal on each side.
Between 1981 and 1983, the Atari's VCS (2600) and Mattel's Intellivision waged a series of high-stakes TV advertising campaigns promoting their respective systems, marking the start of the first console wars.
[44][45] Sports games became more popular across arcades worldwide with the arrival of Konami's Track & Field,[30] known as Hyper Olympic in Japan, introduced in September 1983.
[49] It had a horizontal side-scrolling format, depicting one or two tracks at a time, a large scoreboard that displayed world records and current runs, and a packed audience in the background.
(1984), martial arts sports fighting games such as Technōs Japan's Karate Champ (1984),[30][54] the Nintendo VS. System titles VS. Tennis and VS.
Baseball, Taito's golf game Birdie King II, and Data East's Tag Team Wrestling.
[54] 10-Yard Fight in 1983 had a career mode, where the player progresses from high school, to college, professional, playoff, and Super Bowl, as the difficulty increases with each step.
[42] Another sports game with female player characters was Taito's Joshi Volleyball (Big Spikers),[58] which topped the Japanese table arcade cabinet chart in December 1983.
[88] On home consoles, Mattel released Intellivision World Series Baseball (IWSB), designed by Don Daglow and Eddie Dombrower, in late 1983.
[90] It was also one of the first sports video games to feature audibly speaking digitized voices (as opposed to text), using the Mattel Intellivoice module.
They played an important role in the history of the Nintendo Entertainment System, as they were the earliest NES games released in North America, initially in the arcades and then with the console's launch.
Konami's Double Dribble (1986) featured colorful graphics, five-on-five gameplay, cutaway animations for slam dunks, and a digitized version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" theme.
[26] Konami's Punk Shot (1990) is an arcade basketball game with an element of violence, allowing players to physically attack each other, which CU Amiga magazine compared to the film Rollerball (1975).
[100] In 1989, Electronic Arts producer Richard Hilleman hired GameStar's Scott Orr to re-design John Madden Football for the fast-growing Sega Genesis.
[109] In 1991, the American football game Tecmo Super Bowl was the first mainstream sports game to feature both the league and player association licenses of the sport it emulated; previous titles either had one license or the other, but Tecmo Super Bowl was the first to feature real NFL players on real teams.
EA followed Jordan vs. Bird: One on One (1988) with Lakers versus Celtics and the NBA Playoffs (1989), the latter ported to the Genesis in 1991, which added more simulation aspects to the subgenre.
[111] In its first twelve months of release, NBA Jam generated over $1 billion to become the highest-grossing arcade sports game of all time.
Early uses of flat-shaded polygons date back to 1991, with home computer games such as 4D Sports Boxing and Winter Challenge.
Sega's arcade title Virtua Striker (1994) was the first association football game to use 3D graphics, and was also notable for its early use of texture mapping.
This led to a wave of similar sports games capitalizing on its success during the late 1990s, from companies such as Sega, Namco, Konami and Innovative Concepts.
Based around boardercross, the game featured fast downhill races, avoiding various objects whilst using others to perform jumps and increase the player's speed.
In 1999, the subgenre was further popularized by Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, an arcade-like skateboarding game where players were challenged to execute elaborate tricks or collect a series of elements hidden throughout the level.
[113][114] On December 13, 2004, Electronic Arts began a string of deals that granted exclusive rights to several prominent sports organizations, starting with the NFL.
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.
[135] He was an Israeli musician and Kung Fu martial artist who researched inter disciplinarian concepts to create the experience of playing an instrument using the whole body's motion.
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.
Independent developers are also creating sports titles like Super Mega Baseball, The Golf Club, and Freestyle2: Street Basketball.
