Beginnings of sports games
Tennis for Two
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 1970s, 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),
1980s
Pole Position
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.
Sensible Soccer
Sensible Soccer
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:
* NHL 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.
Comodore Amiga Cinemaware TV Sports Basketball 1990
Extreme sports enters into the mainstream
In the beginning of the 21 century extreme sports entered into the mainstream with games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater, SSX and Supreme Snowboarding. They popularised sport games like skateboarding, snowboarding, trickbikes, and so on. They affected on sells of other sport games lifting sells overall and inspiring new wave of games.
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.[1] This was quickly followed with two deals in January securing rights to the AFL[2] and ESPN licenses.[3] 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[4]; 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.[5] In April, EA furthered its hold on football licensing by securing rights to all NCAA football brands.[6]
Tennis for Two
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 1970s, 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),
1980s
Pole Position
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.
Sensible Soccer
Sensible Soccer
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:
* NHL 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.
Comodore Amiga Cinemaware TV Sports Basketball 1990
Extreme sports enters into the mainstream
In the beginning of the 21 century extreme sports entered into the mainstream with games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater, SSX and Supreme Snowboarding. They popularised sport games like skateboarding, snowboarding, trickbikes, and so on. They affected on sells of other sport games lifting sells overall and inspiring new wave of games.
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.[1] This was quickly followed with two deals in January securing rights to the AFL[2] and ESPN licenses.[3] 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[4]; 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.[5] In April, EA furthered its hold on football licensing by securing rights to all NCAA football brands.[6]
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