Tecmo Super Bowl: The GOAT of NFL games

Give Tecmo Super Bowl a Google search, and you get 426,000 results. All this for a game which debuted on Dec. 13, 1991 as the follow-up to Tecmo Bowl (date provided by TecmoBowlers.com).

Tecmo Bowl was released in arcades in 1987 and the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989. It only featured 12 NFL teams and in a wonky style at that. The NFL did not license the product, although the NFL Players Association did, making for an odd layout, also according to TecmoBowlers.com. The Raiders, Redskins, Colts, Dolphins, Vikings, 49ers, Broncos, Cowboys, Seahawks, Bears, Browns and Giants were on the game, but all the teams were only called by their cities. If you rooted for any of the other 16 NFL teams of the time, you were out of luck.

TSB was developed originally for the NES before moving over to Sega Genesis. It was a trailblazer in many fashions, including being the first pro football game to carry every NFL team license. For the first time, a fan could turn on their football game and be guaranteed to see the team they love.

It was a game far ahead of its time. Each team was given a playbook that had interchangeable plays, along with rosters that featured both starters and backups. While the defensive players could not be subbed out or injured, the offensive players could be swapped and/or injured.

TSB was incredibly simple yet overwhelmingly detailed for the time. The artificial intelligence was about to compile and save stats throughout the regular season format, anything from rushing yards to quarterback rating. All of this is child’s play now, but at the time was revolutionary.

Heck, you could play in coach mode in 1991. Damn. In 2011, IGN rated the top 100 games of all-time. TSB landed No. 24, the highest-rated sports game ever created on their list. In 2012, PC Magazine ranked TSB 10th on a list of the most influential games ever, saying the following:

"Tecmo Super Bowl may be fondly remembered for its huge, broken plays, great roster (featuring the likes of Joe Montana, Bo Jackson, and the original LT), and deep stat-tracking, but there’s one aspect of the game that is often forgotten: it was the first mainstream sports video game to feature both the league and player association licenses of the sport it emulated. Many sports games of the era (such as RBI Baseball) either had one license or the other; with Tecmo Super Bowl you could play with real NFL players on real teams. The combination of both licenses is an idea that would become standard fare in games such as Major League Baseball 2K10, but Tecmo Super Bowl was one of the first, and it did it well."

Shockingly, no other football games were anywhere near this list. Over at ESPN, Tecmo Super Bowl was rated as the greatest sports game of all-time.

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