VIDEO GAMES IN CASA VEGA: A DETAILED HISTORY

My journey with video games started very early. I was completely entranced by the tiny ColecoVision box my mom brought home. We plugged it into the adapter that connected to the TV and it allowed us to turn the dials and move the little Pong sliders up and down to bounce the ball back and forth. It was a crude version of tennis, and I simply could not turn away. We all fought for turns on this new device. We truly loved this new gaming machine.

This was quickly followed up by my oldest brother buying a new Atari. If Coleco was a bike with training wheels, Atari was a Ferrari. Games were in color (not the tones of green of Coleco), you held a buttoned joystick (very similar to the arcade experience) and there was a large library of games to choose from. It instantly became the most popular device in the family. I remember spending hours on end playing my favorite of the games, Defender. Defeating enemy ships who constantly try to swoop down and steal citizens while you blast them out of the sky and catch the citizens was everything.

As my brothers got older and showed less interest in games—and realizing how important they were to me—my mother bought me a Nintendo. Video games for me had become a way of life. As the fourth kid out of fi ve, I was signifi cantly younger than my older siblings, and my younger sibling didn’t really play video games at all. Continued Page 43

You see, I’m an introvert. I’m socially awkward and I have historically had a hard time relating to other people. As such, being able to dive into a world of games where I could completely lose myself worked for me. The Nintendo was amazing. This was in a whole different stratusphere of gaming. Full color games, amazing graphics (for the time), and the one game that would change everything for me... Tecmo Bowl.

Being raised in a sports-obsessed household meant we were always talking about or watching sports. We also played lots of strat-o-matic board games. We had giant leagues with my brothers’ friends in the neighborhood for our card-based strategy simulation games. Unfortunately they didn’t stick around when we moved from the board games to the virtual video games. That was a solo endeavor for me. As I explained above, the introvert in me loved the quiet time at home to zone out and play video games. Nothing provided an escape quite like Tecmo Bowl, which perfectly meshed my love of sports and video games.

The first Tecmo Bowl was incredibly crude. Twelve teams, four plays for each team. They also did not have the offi cial NFLPA license, so the players are only identifi ed by their last names and the teams are only identifi ed by their cities. While sports games up to this point were very rudimentary, this game felt like something had changed. Gameplay was better, graphics were smoother—this was a huge step up. For me, it was everything. I would lock myself in my room and play full seasons of teams over a weekend. I would keep meticulous stats based on these games (I’ve always been a fan of statistics in sports) and tally up full season winners and losers. Tecmo had a huge hit on their hands. You’d be hardpressed to fi nd a video game fan in his early- to mid-40s who doesn’t rave about Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl, still to this day the most dominant running back in any game ever. (Christian Okoye a close dominant second.) The game performed so well that yearly installments started to be released with new playbooks, an NFLPA tie-in (full player and team names), even better graphics, the ability to make substitutions, and all stats were saved in game. (I still kept my own notebook of full season stats.)

As I stormed through school and entered the workforce, video games remained a constant. I remember using one of my early paychecks to excitedly go out and buy the Super Nintendo system. With the dawn of a new system came the debut of the Tecmo Super Bowl for the SNES. Everything that was enhanced in the last installment on the Nintendo was essentially buffed. This game was perfect. It 100% did not disappoint. That same year, another game launched that would start a lifetime of devotion, Bulls Vs. Blazers by EA Sports. There was fi nally a good console basketball simulation game. I can still remember how dominant Tom Chambers was in this game. He could dunk from the free throw line with regularity. (Who? They had the 16 teams that made the playoffs, and he was on the Suns.) As the years passed, the advancements on Tecmo Bowl started to lessen, while the NBA game became the main focus of my gaming life. This would stay consistent for quite a few years. I would try and play 41-game seasons with as many teams as possible to simulate their upcoming seasons and again keep their stats in my trusty notebook.

While still fun, Tecmo Super Bowl (and the subsequent Special Edition, Final Edition, Kickoff and Throwback) defi nitely took a backseat to the now rebranded NBA simulation game titles NBA Live. EA Sports spared no expense in tremendous graphics and game play. Instead of having only the playoffs team ala Bulls vs. Blazers, NBA Live now had the entire league and would update every fall with the latest rosters and new college players. I would instantly play full seasons with the teams that drafted Duke players. I still have fond memories of playing full seasons with Laettner on the TWolves, Grant Hill on the Pistons, and even Bobby Hurley on the Grizzlies. This game was tremendous. I would be a devoted player of NBA Live for a full decade. But its run as my favorite game would be short lived, because EA Sports was perfecting the best sports simulation game of all-time.

With Tecmo no longer having the NFL license, or putting out new games, there was a huge void to fi ll. I tried them all: Joe Montana football, NFL Gameday, ESPN Football, but that all changed with John Madden Football.

Specifi cally Madden ’95 on the Sega Genesis. My oldest brother (the original owner of the Atari) had recently purchased a Sega Genesis. He lived on the 4th fl oor of the apartment building we all lived in. We would spend hours playing Sonic, Streets of Rage 2 but most of all Madden. Madden became the perfect fi x for our old school Strat-OMatic league. My brother and I decided we would play every game on the NFL Schedule. We would draft our teams and play. It was here that I developed my love for the mobile quarterback running a Power I formation. (I ran a very boring, very effi cient offense. I would run on first down. I would run on second down. Then on third down, I might fake a pass and then run with quarterback anyway. I’m going to waste the entire clock. When you get the ball, you’re going to feel like you need to do something very quickly and probably do something very dumb.) My teams would ultimately meet in the Super Bowl with the mobile Steve Young being an absolute revelation. More importantly. I had a new favorite game. One with tremendous graphics and gameplay and a full playbook with hundreds of plays. It was an NFL simulation dream.

I became a full fledged devotee of EA Sports. If they sold a sports title, I purchased it. Besides Madden and NBA Live, I instantly bought Triple Play baseball (and then MVP Baseball), Fight Night, Tiger Woods Golf, and NHL Live (yes, NHL). The EA brand meant an excellence to detail and an accuracy to statistics and simulation. It was the golden age of sports games.

As I was getting married (the first time) and getting ready to move away, I remember my sister giving me a monetary gift and specifically telling me the money was for a new gaming system. She suggested I would need it—and she was right. That’s when I fi nally moved away from Nintendo and Sega and fully invested in the Sony Playstation. There were many nights that my trusty German Shepherd and my PS1 were the only things keeping me sane in the world. The next gen graphics were a huge step up from where the competitive systems were. That plus the ability to play audio cds or dvds was a huge bonus. It was a great system. It also carried all the EA games, so almost from the launch I was able to keep my addiction to EA going. Playstation had a robust roster of titles, so I dabbled in other adventure games such as Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, Devil May Cry, etc. My obsession has and always will be sports simulation games.