You’re feeling nostalgic. You want to play the best NES sports games. Or maybe you just want to read about them until the clock hits 5.30 and you can stop pretending to work on that deck. But how well do they really hold up today?
8 bits of information isn’t much. But within those narrow margins the Nintendo Entertainment System’s greatest creators conjured worlds for an early generation of games to lose themselves in. And in that landscape, a games industry where the rules weren’t close to being drawn up yet, the sports game genre took form.
Playing these 8-bit sports games is, let’s face it, an exercise in nostalgia. They haven’t aged like those artful 16-bit sprites that came after them, their controls are often stiff and their level of interaction very basic. But within their cartridges lie parts of our childhood. And that’s enough, isn’t it?
If you want more retro sports goodness, check our list of best Sega Genesis sports games. Of course, we have a list of overall best NES games too.
Track and Field – 1992
Many, many controllers were laid to waste at the hands of 8-bit athletes striving for sporting greatness in front of this game. First debuting as an arcade game in 1983, Track & Field pioneered the button-bashing control scheme we now know, love, and attribute much of our subsequent arthritis to. The NES version featured Barcelona ‘92 branding to coincide with the Olympic Games happening in its year of release.
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! – 1987
We wouldn’t want to test this theory, but we suspect beating Punch-Out! is roughly as difficult as lasting a round in the ring with actual Mike Tyson. Another game with arcade origins, it didn’t care if you didn’t understand the controls and subtle timings required to beat anyone. Because the first Punch-Out! only gained your quarters by being obtuse and ridiculously challenging. Once you do learn its rhythms though, you find a game way ahead of its time – to the degree that people are still speedrunning it today.
Excitebike – 1985
The bikes, they excite. Excitebike. Whoever named this game, let’s get them reinstated in the games industry. Assassin’s Creed? Historythrillstab. Call of Duty? Gunboner. Ad infinitum. We digress – here was our first chance to launch dirt bikes at dangerous jumps in a convincing fashion, in a 2D, side-on format comparable to modern Trials games. You could even design your own tracks in an editor – mindblowing at the time – and add 19 types of obstacles.
California Games – 1987
Now this game and its ilk have a pretty bad reputation among the NES community, and it’s true that California Games is unintuitive when it comes to controls. But history changes things – now the gnarly, laid-back pseudo-sports title isn’t just a collection of perplexing minigames. It’s a cultural document that reminds us how obsessed we all were with the California surfer lifestyle at the time, and what the word ‘radical’ meant to Gen Xers. It is, therefore, of the utmost significance and importance within the great video game archive.
Tecmo Super Bowl – 1991
Official NFL branding! (Some) Real player names! Er… twelve teams! That would be review-bomb territory for modern Madden, but even partial licensing was a thrill in ‘91, and Tecmo Super Bowl had more going for it. The visuals conveyed a great deal of detail for the time, going side-on rather than top-down like Madden would, meanwhile the gameplay was shamelessly arcade-styled. No penalties here. No poring over complicated plays. Just throw, run, tackle, and celebrate.
Nintendo World Cup – 1990
Forgot all about this one, didn’t you? The name suggests Mario might crop up as some divine Ronaldo-like presence, but actually, Nintendo World Cup played it fairly straight in its depiction of soccer. Well, in that it was played by humans, at least – teams were shrunk down to six a side, and both offsides and fouls seem to have been abolished by the sport’s governing body here. As a result – and this is definitely the favorite memory of anyone who played it – you could just absolutely wail on certain players and knock them out cold for the rest of the half. Yeah. You can see why Mario wouldn’t put his face to this one now.
Blades of Steel – 1988
The games industry had been trying to make ice hockey into a coherent videogame since 1980 and the Intellivision, but we think Blades of Steel was the moment it actually bottled the pace and excitement of the sport on a game cartridge. Yes, the rinks were gray, the teams were fictional, and the voice samples – extremely rare for the time on NES – sounded like a robot sneezing into a TV speaker. But the players flowed around like they were on actual ice, shots cannoned about, and players could even get into fights. Our needs were much simpler then.
NES Open Tournament Golf – 1991
You know the big man would have to feature on this list somewhere, didn’t you? Mr. Mario himself graces the box of NES Open Tournament Golf, and proves himself quite the capable clubsman too, across three courses in the US, UK, and Japan. Modern golf games haven’t strayed too far away from this formula – choose a club, aim your shot, complete a timing-based swing action, swear at the ball as it takes flight towards a tree, turn game off, sit in furious silence for a while. No, but seriously, it was fun.
Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.
