What Had the Biggest Impact on Sports Games During Each Era?

When you’ve played sports games for as long as many of us have, there’s a chance you could forget some of what you’ve experienced along the way. But we’ve seen a lot and been around for a lot.

There’s been a lot of Maddens, a lot of NBA 2Ks, a lot of sports video games of the good and bad variety. But along the way, certain things do reach out from what can sometimes become the iterative morass to change sports games — and sometimes video games themselves.

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Call them innovations, good ideas, great games — it could be a lot of things. This is the reason for today’s newsletter. I want to go back and pick out what had the biggest impact on sports games from every console generation, starting with the NES.

Now, you might not know this, but the idea of console generations is a bit complicated and argumentative. Some folks scoff at the idea of what’s designated as the third generation and so on, so I’m going to mostly avoid those tags. Instead, I’m going to just go through the eras of consoles and leave out the other designations about generations and so forth (at least for the most part).

In addition, I’m going to try and focus mostly on the games/consoles themselves rather than the business dealings that go on behind the scenes. If I wanted to go off the biggest “impact” of a generation overall, then stuff like exclusive licenses or the rising cost of making games once we hit the HD generation would win out, but that’s not as fun to talk about.

Anyway, those are the general guidelines I’ll be following, so now let’s jump into things and start with my arbitrary starting point, which is the NES generation.

The Era Of The NES (Mid ‘80s)

The NES is influential for a ton of reasons, and I think a lot of these early generations are defined not so much by the games themselves but the structure that was created for the future.

Certain cartridges having a “save” capability on them was huge for sports games so you didn’t just have to leave the console on for days on end. We also had an explosion of high quality sports games due to the success of the console itself. The sheer number of fun sports games I uncovered via flea markets and game stores kept me on my toes for many years until the internet made things much easier via eBay and ROMs (don’t arrest me, please). To be clear, I also played a ton of trash when going back through the NES library as a kid — it’s maybe the most feast or famine era of all-time.

However, the NES D-pad feels like the correct answer here over any specific game. Even if I wasn’t alive for this generation when it was starting out, I can still remember discovering the NES in the ‘90s and the perfect feel of that D-pad while moving my pitch around the zone in Bases Loaded or going sideline to sideline in Super Tecmo Bowl.

Good controls are everything in video games overall, but sports games would not have been what they were in this era if we had been stuck with an arcade-like joystick with the NES. Four cardinal directions was sufficient for a long time, and the NES D-pad withstood the test of time as it still more or less continues on to this day with each successive Nintendo console — and we still complain about D-pads on other controllers not being as good as the ones on Nintendo consoles.

The Genesis/SNES Generation (Early ‘90s)

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