(AfroGamers.com) This year is the 30th Anniversary of one of the greatest and most influential video games of all time and the name of that game is the critically acclaimed 1991 Tecmo Super Bowl for The NES.
One of my earliest memories of the game was seeing my older brother playing this game heavily in his room and when I saw him playing Tecmo Super Bowl on the NES for the first time, I thought it was absolutely cool and I wanted to play the game as well. My older brother very rarely allowed his younger siblings like me to come inside of his room let alone play any of the video games that he had in his room.
But a few years after that experience of watching him playing Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES, I actually got to play Tecmo Super Bowl for the SNES and I vividly remember playing as The Miami Dolphins and my older brother was playing as The Houston Oilers because he was such a huge fan of legendary pro football Hall Of Fame quarterback Warren Moon at the time and my very first experience of playing Tecmo Super Bowl of any version and in this case The SNES Version was extremely bittersweet. My older brother literally destroyed me 63-0 and I remember being angry and crying so much that I quickly stormed out of his room crying.
The critically acclaimed 1991 Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES is the sequel to the popular 1988 Tecmo Bowl for the NES where in Tecmo Super Bowl, interceptions and fumbles were very rare to come buy and difficult to get against the opposing A.I. team. Unlike Tecmo Bowl, it had all the players from all the teams that were active in The NFL around the time of the game’s release.
The legacy of Tecmo Super Bowl is very strong that hardcore fans of the 1991 NES version of the game have updated the game with modern day NFL rosters and teams over the past decade now through the use of hack ROMs.
This game even made certain football players famous like ex-49ers RB Roger Craig, who not only won 3 Super Bowls with the team during its peak in the 1980s, but is also one of the most underrated running backs in NFL history told ESPN in a 2016 interview that he got a surprise phone call from famous rapper Snoop Dogg telling him that “You were my favorite player in Tecmo Bowl. Christian Oyoke who was known way back then as “The Nigerian Nightmare” said that the game brought him so much popularity and notoriety that when he first played the game as himself, he absolutely loved it because he was an absolute beast. And lastly, Tecmo Bowl & Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES made Bo Jackson a sports legend because if you played as him in either one of the games running the ball, he was an absolute beast in those games. If you ask many of the older gamers back then what they remember about Bo Jackson, they will tell you that they dominated Tecmo Bowl & Tecmo Super Bowl by playing as him on the NES. The games truly solidified Bo Jackson as one of the greatest sports video game athletes of all time.
I wrote a piece a few years ago titled “My Favorite Gridiron Football Video Games” in which I listed my top 5 favorite gridiron football video games of all time and I put the critically acclaimed 1991 Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES as #1 on my list.
Excerpt from that article: “This amazing gridiron football game that came out for The NES in 1991 is my personal favorite gridiron football game because it was so fun, enjoyable, and action paced. A lot of people have stated that Bo Jackson was their favorite athlete from this game, but for me personally, my favorite athlete from this game was Barry Sanders because Barry was more agile and shifty than Bo and like Bo, he was also an absolute beast because whenever you give him the ball, he absolutely shreds and zig-zags his way through defenders and goes full speed to the end zone. This game was also among the first to actually allow players to make changes to the starting lineup for example you can replace an aging Joe Montana and replace him with a younger QB in Steve Young on The San Francisco 49ers football team. More than 25 years after this game was released, it still has a massive cult-like following to this day with Tecmo Super Bowl tournaments being held around the country each year.”
The Conclusion – Even though there are many sports video games that haven’t aged well like NBA Hangtime or even EA’s version of NBA Jam, but Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES is one of a special handful of sports games that have aged so well for the past 30 years since its release on the NES during the final few years of the NES era.
Staff Writer; Kwame Shakir (aka Joe D.)