Arcade Sports Games Need a Revival

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Arcade sports games were not something I talked about much in my 2025 sports game predictions. That seems crazy to me considering many of the greatest sports games of all-time are “arcade” sports games.

From a history perspective, I think it’s relatively undisputed that NFL Blitz, NBA Jam, Super Tecmo Bowl, and NBA Street are on Mount Rushmore. If you include SSX or Tony Hawk games, one of those maybe makes it. Maybe you’re partial to a particular Mario Tennis or Mario Golf. Maybe it’s NFL Street, The Bigs, or even something way older like a Super Dodge Ball that gets a spot instead. Hell, you could make the argument that NHL 94 and most sports games up until the PS1 era are “arcade” sports games just because of their general simplicity tied to the technical limitation of the times.

Whatever is on your Rushmore, the point is it’s slim pickings these days when it comes to arcade sports games — and licensed arcade sports games are even rarer.

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What Is An Arcade Sports Game?

In my predictions piece, I did mention that the Sifu developers are creating Rematch, which is a competitive online soccer game that is releasing in 2025, and I do think it’s an important game. However, it’s not exactly what I’m thinking about when it comes to arcade sports games and their potential revival. Sifu was a very technical beat ‘em up that was tapping into the likes of Sekiro. It’s a hard but rewarding game with an incredibly high skill cap. Rematch seems like it’s focused on competitive online play and a high skill cap. If it works well, then it will perhaps be like Rocket League where casual fans can pick it up and enjoy it, but there’s also the high-level play and secret skills that most of us will never be able to pull off.

To an extent, the quality of Rematch itself is irrelevant to my larger point about arcade sports games not just being “arcade” games because they’re over the top in some way. Rocket League is an insane concept — and a great one — but it’s not a “traditional” arcade game to me. There is a ton of high level, crazy stuff you can do in it that 98 percent of people will never pull off. It goes beyond not knowing a particular “fatality” in Mortal Kombat or not knowing the codes to unlock Bill Clinton or George Clinton in NBA Jam. Some people attain a level of skill in Rocket League that is never going to be unlocked by most of us mere mortals.

The “best” arcade sports games to me are not those sorts of games. And, to be clear, I’m not demeaning Rocket League by saying that. Rocket League is incredible, and it’s one of the most ingenious games created in the last 10 years (in fact it turns 10 this year!). But there is a clear difference between an NBA Jam and a Rocket League. With NBA Jam, it’s all right there in front of you. From the ratings to the mechanics, not much of anything is hidden. Shove people a lot, pick the best players, and learn what it means to be “on fire” and you’re mostly all the way home. Sure, there are certain spots on the floor where shots will go in most of the time if you get a clean enough look, but even something like that is so much easier to learn than the technical skills and timings that a Rocket League or Sifu will demand of you if you want to be great.

You can be very good at NBA Jam and usually beat your friends, but the best Rocket League players are never going to lose to an average player. It’s just not happening. I believe that in an “ideal” arcade sports game, there’s always a chance you might lose.

The Carpenter Of It All

As a bit of a movie freak, I think of the best arcade sports games as John Carpenter movies. I like Carpenter movies for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that they’re all short. I’m not sure he’s ever made a movie with a runtime that eclipsed two hours, and most of them are closer to 90 minutes than even two hours.

If you’re not aware of John Carpenter, he’s directed movies such as Halloween, The Thing, and Escape From New York. These are rewatchable masterpieces, but they’re masterpieces in part because of their restraint. Michael Myers is scarier with only the hints of a full backstory (at least in the original Halloween). He’s just evil and wants to kill people. It makes no sense that there’s basically no kids on the street and almost no one is home on Halloween night, but the fact that Carpenter had no budget for extras was actually for the better. It makes everything more unsettling and scary.

Why was New York City chosen as prison island, and how did things get so bad in the US? Why is a guy who sounds British (for the record, Donald Pleasence is a legend) the president of the US? It doesn’t matter. Snake being a cool friggin’ movie character and Carpenter’s music is all you really need to make a badass movie.

In The Thing, why did all these guys choose to basically isolate themselves in Alaska in the first place? Who are they? It doesn’t matter, all that matters is that no one knows what “the thing” really is or who it is now, and now it’s a threat to the entire world and has to be stopped before it takes over all life on Earth.

You don’t need all this world building, backstory, and lore to make a great movie. Yes, you still need great directors, actors, music, scripts, and visuals to make any movie special, but not everything needs to be Marvel-ized and have continuous stories that you follow from television to the movies and then back to television. Sometimes all you really need is a tight 90-minute movie with one great idea in it.

So How Did We Get Here And Can It Be Fixed?

The “lore” in sports games is the extra mechanics. People who played NBA Jam or NBA Street didn’t suddenly wake up one day and say I don’t want to play these games anymore. I think a lot of them were phased out over time due to a lack of quality arcade sports games and the increasing depth of normal sports games.

I’m not saying that we make NBA 2K a simpler game or remove “realistic” aspects of it. NBA 2K should stay NBA 2K. That said, I think we also need to realize that the moment something like a “post up” mechanic was introduced into our “sim” sports games, that was a flashing “exit” sign for a lot of people who maybe played NBA Jam. They don’t want to learn to post up. No disrespect to post play or the big men out there, but that wasn’t something that was exciting or worth learning. I’m sure a lot of these people had other things that were their breaking points, but the point is at some point arcade sports games stopped being worth it for them.

If we didn’t lose some folks to the increasing depth of sports games, we likely lost others to the calcification of arcade sports games themselves as licenses became more expensive and games became more expensive to make. Those two factors have had an undeniable negative impact on arcade sports games. The early 2000s are the peak for sports games for a variety of reasons, but one of them is clearly the cost of making games was in a sweet spot at that moment and time. The development costs weren’t so crazy because it didn’t take a ton of people to make a video game with non-HD graphics, and sports licenses weren’t yet these costly albatrosses for companies, even if exclusivity also ultimately played a role in that area after a certain point.

The scarcity of arcade sports games increased, and quite frankly, the quality of the ones that did make it out were not usually as good. We would still get the occasional Homecourt or The Bigs, but those were exceptions. Looking back, it’s only now obvious that we still kind of had it made when things like The Bigs were coming out because, well, now the last “major” arcade game I can really think about that had a lot of momentum and marketing behind it was the NBA Playgrounds series.

(Playgrounds is a fine enough game — at least the first one is — but it’s not Street or Jam or even Homecourt. It lacks a memorable art style, on top of not quite having a good enough gameplay loop.)

It’s not that we don’t have current-day bright spots like Super Mega Baseball or the terrific Retro Bowl, but there’s a lack of momentum for arcade sports games. Much like most real sports, you need a “star” to make your team a contender. I think we’re sort of waiting around for that star, and I’m not sure if any of these companies with the licensing are trying very hard to make new stars. I believe that is a mistake. I have no doubt there are still plenty of people out there who would play a quality arcade sports game.

I think EA felt burned by their Blitz and Jam recreations years back, but that’s mostly on EA. Those re-imaginings were not as good (though Jam got much closer than Blitz). 2K Sports gave Playgrounds a second go — albeit Saber Interactive technically develops it not 2K Sports — but microtransactions and other factors seemed to torpedo the second version of the game and now that series is mostly irrelevant. We have Super Mega Baseball with more licensing these days, but it’s still mostly on the periphery. Outside of a “major” star, we’d need a wave of quality role players hitting all around the same time to get a similar effect, which feels even less likely.

This is all a way for me to return to the point that it makes sense why I didn’t have a lot of arcade sports game predictions for 2025, and it’s because it feels like most game companies have forgotten about them as well. Development and license costs maybe end up keeping the lights off for arcade sports games, but I hope at some point someone pays their electric bill.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase