If you’re in the right crowd and you mention Tecmo Super Bowl, someone’s eyes will light up. That someone is probably male, between the ages of 27 and 40, and the product of a middle-class family located somewhere on Planet Earth. In other words, a lot of people played Tecmo Super Bowl.*
Tecmo Super Bowl hit my video game sweet spot. I was 13 when it came out, and the Shirley parents were beginning to loosen their restrictions on Nintendo play. If our parents were home, my brothers and I still had to ask if we could play video games, but because our mother had begun to work full time as a nurse again, we were often left to our own entertainment devices. And once we had finished feeding the cows and watering the chickens and weeding the tomatoes and doing our math homework, the device of record was the Nintendo.
As video games go, Tecmo Super Bowl is not the most complex or the most intense. Its graphics are terrible (with the exception of the jumping high five) and like many Nintendo games, it only works about forty percent of the time (when the cartridge is pushed all the way in and when the Nintendo itself feels like it). But it reminds me why my brothers and I started playing video games in the first place. We didn’t do it to escape from the world or to take out our anger on a set of pixellated Russians. We did it because video games are, at their core, games. And the primary objective of games, whether they’re called Scattergories or Starcraft, is exactly what Tecmo Super Bowl delivers every time: fun.
Talk to any Tecmo Super Bowl player long enough and he’ll tell you which teams were his favorites. The trick was to find a basket of teams that evened out; it would have been easy to say that your favorite teams to play with were the New York Giants, the San Francisco 49ers and the Buffalo Bills, because that would have meant a win every time you jammed that gray cartridge into its rectangular home. The point with Tecmo Super Bowl wasn’t always to smash your opponent, though. The point was to make it just hard enough on yourself that winning was a challenge.
It was like a handicap in golf. If you pick the Bears (get ready for a heavy dose of Neal Anderson), I’ll pick the Bills (you’re going to be tired of Cornelius Bennett tackling everyone in his sight). But if you pick the Packers (Don Majikowski, anyone?), I’ll risk playing with the Patriots (hey, they’ve got Irving Fryar; maybe I have a chance).
Consistent with my belief that you could always win if you could run the ball, I cycled through the Bills, Raiders and Lions. The Bills made life easy; the latter two teams caused me no limit of frustration. (Catch the fucking ball, Richard Johnson!) While the Raiders were nearly unstoppable on the original Tecmo Bowl, they had been mortalized in time for TSB: Bo Jackson had gotten a step slower, and Jay Schroeder’s favorite target for passes was the sixth row.
My brother Dan always took the Dolphins and the Oilers; he didn’t want to think too hard, preferring to lob moon balls destined for Mark Clayton, Mark Duper, Ernest Givins and Drew Hill. (Goddammit, Dan, you’re such a fucking cheater!)
Matt was more pragmatic; like with every game he’s ever played, he cut to the chase. And in Tecmo Super Bowl, the chase is defense. A team with a speedy linebacker is a team that will always be in the game. Matt found just those teams in the Giants (Lawrence Taylor), the Bears (Mike Singletary), and the Chiefs (Derrick Thomas).
My brothers and I loved Tecmo Super Bowl because it was simple, because it didn’t take long to play, and because the possibilities were endless.** Sure, Super Mario Brothers was great, but you knew that every time you got to 8-3, those goddamned Hammer Brothers were going to be there and their goddamned hammers were going to travel in the same goddamned arcs. Not so with Tecmo Super Bowl; one time out of five, my desperate, 80-yard heave to Willie Gault might end in a diving catch, propelling me to a late touchdown and five minutes of gloating. (I told you, Matt, rushing the quarterback will bite you in the ass!) Another time, what looks like a clear hole through the line might close up in a flash, thanks to Dan’s furious work with the A button and Ray Childress’s fearsome speed rating of 38.
As has been noted often, the video game industry is now larger than the movie industry. This is vexing to some, as they imagine pimply, black-clad youths hunkered over Xboxes in basements, drinking Mountain Dew and forgetting how to interact with humanity. This fear is not unfounded; most of today’s hot gaming titles revolve less around interaction with humanity and more around immersion in a virtual world.
Tecmo Super Bowl is immersive, to be sure; time always stopped when I got Singletary to bite on a play action and found James Lofton streaking toward the end zone. But it wasn’t so dominant that I ever forget that I was playing against the person on my right (or left, if I was relegated to the second-player slot). And, because a game only took twenty minutes, there was still time left in the day for a trip outside to shoot baskets or to hit each other with inflated rubber balls.
I was never addicted to Tecmo Super Bowl. It never occupied my dreams like Super Mario Brothers, its graphics didn’t blow my mind like any number of Nintendo 64 games, and I was never as fanatical about it as I was about Guitar Hero. But I was addicted to playing Tecmo Super Bowl. Still am, in fact.
And this – play – is something that is often forgotten in any discussion (or development) of video games. Play usually comes about because of imagination – because the framework of the game is simple, but because we bring our own brains to bear in our efforts to play it. There’s a reason people still play chess, and tic-tac-toe and backgammon. When it comes to gaming, simpler is usually better.
I’m not so naïve to think that Tecmo Super Bowl will be around as long as chess or backgammon. For one thing, the pins inside the Nintendo won’t stave off corrosion that long. But it will be around longer than Call Of Duty. How do I know this? Because I’ve been playing Tecmo Super Bowl a lot lately, in my apartment in Culver City, on a Nintendo I brought from Kansas, which is connected to a 36-inch tube television that one of those same brothers helped me carry out of some guy’s apartment in Hermosa Beach after we found it for free on Craigslist.
And now, 20 years after it’s release, I still have fun. Every time. The games are still short (I continue to wonder who decided how long the “seconds” on the game’s clock would be) and it’s still remarkably easy to create a competitive match.
I thought, when I first resurrected Tecmo Super Bowl, that my affection for the game might be attached to nostalgia. But as I’ve continued to play for the last three weeks, I’ve decided my memory isn’t what’s making me ask Matt to keep playing. I ask Matt to play because Tecmo Super Bowl isn’t just a great video game. It’s a great game that happens to use a video output. And that’s about the nicest thing you can say about a video game.
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* When this mentioning occurs, it is likely that there will be some confusion about the Tecmo nomenclature. The original (Tecmo Bowl) was released in 1989. Some humans remember this game fondly; they think of the unstoppable Bo Jackson and the preternatural San Francisco 49ers. When it comes to advancement, Tecmo Bowl was to Tecmo Super Bowl what the sharp stick is to the Gatling Gun. The features added in Tecmo Super Bowl were numerous and bounteous: Real teams! And all of them! Substitutions! A Team Data screen that allows you to pick the plays your team will use! And further, eight plays in your command screen! (As opposed to the four options in Tecmo.)
** One of our childhood goals was to complete an entire Tecmo Bowl Season. It seemed easy enough; the game’s makers would run through the schedule, simulating wins and losses of the teams no one had picked and flashing a notification that it was someone’s turn to play. (Dan, get your ass upstairs. You have to play Tampa Bay!) But alas, despite rumors that game data could be saved as long as you held in the Reset button when you turned off the Nintendo, we never could put together a full year. We got close once, making it all the way to the playoffs, but then Mom came home with groceries. The next time we put in the game, we had to employ all manner of blowing and heating and nudging (Try all the way to the right!) to get it to work. When we arrived at the welcome screen, we knew that our quest had ended prematurely – the plays were different and our season was gone, melted into the netherworld that is lost computer data.
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EDIT: Bears RB was Neal Anderson.
My best TSB memory came courtesy of a glitch. I was playing as the Chiefs against my buddy’s Bills, when Thurman Thomas fumbled. Instead of the play being blown dead when we piled ob the ball…a Chiefs defender shook off the crowd and kept going. No whistles, no out of bounds, Tecmo Super Bowl had become Tecmo Rugby. We continued to scrum back and forth for an hour before we got bored and decifed jumping from the trampoline to the pool would be a better use of oour time.
Pretty big fan, to the point it annoys me when people call the game “Super Tecmo Bowl” and not “Tecmo Super Bowl.”
Original Nintendo will never be matched on pure gameplay, simply because they couldn’t fall back on fancy graphics and other bells and whistles. The games had to be fun.
I’m saddened you never finished a season. That’s just wrong on so many levels, but Nintendos were fickle. Mine only worked with the Game Genie in for about the last 3 years of its life.
Paul. You got me. 28. White. Middle class. Bam.
I’m undefeated in STB. My team is the 49ers. Every one thinks you should pass to Jerry Rice, throw the long route to John Taylor, he never drops it.
No mention of Cortez Kennedy or Randall Cunningham? Heresy! Played a season w/ Seattle and pretty sure Cortez had triple digit sacks. Randall was Vick 1.0, and the source of one of my most memorable childhood experiences, but that is a story for me to blissfully remember and one to haunt the dreams of my neighbor, Ben.
PS. 98% of my football knowledge during the late 80s came from TSB.
PSS. Marion Butts, great game, great name.
Randall Cunningham? Who’s that? I know only of QB Eagles. And QB Bills. And QB Browns. I fit the description perfectly too: 29, white, male, middle class. My team is the Oilers just because the foursome of Hill, Givins, Jeffires, and Duncan are unstoppable. The only problem is that White fumbles the ball every third carry. Oh, and I had at least 150 sacks one season with Ray Childress. Such a beast. I don’t understand how you never finished a season. You could do it in a day! I completed hundreds of seasons, but my original NES still works perfectly (with the obligatory “stick it in, push left” technique) so maybe I got a rare one that will last another 20+ years.
I’ve long been a fan of Paul’s writing, but not sure an article has ever hit home as squarely as this one. Couldn’t agree more with the sentiments, most pointedly my brother and I playing a 20-minute game (or 2), and then heading outside to continue our “real” athletic pursuits. As opposed to the people getting caught up in 12-hour Halo or Call of Duty sessions these days.
Further to your point, while home for Christmas last year my brother located a mythical piece of technology at a local used game store: a single box that plays ALL NES, Sega and SNES games. For $50, we have been able to recapture our youth every time we return home for the holidays. We keep the magical machine at our parents house, since that seems the only appropriate venue for us to do battle.
And for the record, QB Eagles is the most unstoppable single force in the game.
did you know that tecmo super bowl gets updated every year with new rosters and stats? check it out here: http://www.famssu.com/tecmo/
only issue is you have to use an emulator and play it on the pc. BUT with the emulator/pc setup you can also save your game state so playing through a season is a breeze:)
long live tecmo super bowl!