Since as long as I can remember, I have been a sports fan. Not only have I always been a sports fan but I have been a diehard almost to the point of obsessive, fan. Even as a young kid I was always playing or watching sports. If I wasn’t playing baseball or football or road hockey then I could be found glued to some sporting event on television. I even started working in the sports field so to say at a young age. At the age of 12, I started working at the local par 3 golf course down the road. This was a great way to pay for my golf membership and to make a little extra money. I could also be found umpiring games and when I was old enough to get myself there, I would regularly attend the live sporting events in our town. This is a story that I will tell at a later time but for now, I want to focus on another element of sports in my life. The evolution of sports video games.
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I was born in the mid 70’s and so I grew up during the early boom of the video game industry. I had an Atari gaming system when I was a kid and was a gamer through my entire youth. The gaming industry opened up so many options for types of games and gameplay itself. I liked a lot of different genres of games but I was primarily fascinated by sports based games. If I wasn’t out playing sports or watching sports then there was a good chance you could find me playing sports-related video games.
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One of the first sports games that I can remember playing a significant amount of was the baseball game for the Atari system. Looking back now, the graphics were terrible and the gameplay was so minimal nit when I was 7 and 8 years old this was revolutionary to me. We spent hours trying to hit that little dot that represented a ball and chase it all over the screen. There were some other games that I played on the Atari such as tennis and one of my all-time favourites, Pole Position. This racing game is responsible for consuming so much of my time and I loved every minute of it. The crazy thing is that when you look at the game now it is simply moving the car side to side to avoid obstacles and push the gas. The sports games industry has come so far since those early days.
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Upon looking at the sports video game industry a little closer for this post I had no idea that I had actually played my first sports video game without even knowing it. Pong is recognized as one of the very first sports video games. It makes sense when you think that the game is essentially digital ping pong or tennis but for some reason as a child, I never associated this as being a sports game. Many a countless hour was spent watching that little dot go back and forth on my screen. It is no wonder we didn’t get dizzy playing that game.
Pong was not the first video game, but it was certainly the first mainstream video game. It was also a sports game, as it is basically a crude interpretation of tennis.
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My friends and I really started to get excited about sports games when the Nintendo Gaming System was released. Nintendo started to take the graphics of these games to a whole new level and the level in which we were able to interact with the game was getting more sophisticated. We started playing baseball games where you could adjust where the hitter stood and how he swung the bat. You were even able to manipulate the pitches coming into the plate. I can recall so many times arguments starting while we played RBI Baseball because the pitches were unfair. Then came “Mike Tyson’s Punch Out”. This boxing game was both fun and entertaining but also challenging. As I look back at that game now I can say with all honesty that I can’t imagine it being released like that now. The stereotypes that are exemplified in this game are over the top and would not be accepted today.
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The Nintendo also brought us “Tecmo Bowl”. This was the first football video game that I ever played and to me, it was the most epic thing ever. The controls were ridiculously simple and the graphics were terrible but we didn’t care. We were able to choose and run plays and we had real NFL name football players for the first time ever. We were able to score touchdowns with our favourite players. This and the extensive playbook made this game revolutionary to us and we spent countless hours playing this legendary game.
Originally released as an arcade game in 1987, the game featured a large dual screen cabinet and allowed up to four players to compete in a match between two fictitious teams. A port for the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in 1989 and was the first console game to include real NFL players, via a license from the NFLPA.
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We also played primitive hockey games like “Blades of Steel” where the most fun part was making players bang into each other until the started fighting. I can still remember the music from that game as if I had just played it yesterday. The funniest part of this game was the fact that the players seemed to have no heads. We also played a hockey game called “Ice Hockey” that was hilarious fun. The players were stubby little men of all shapes and sizes and their abilities seemed to coincide with their look.
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This was a time in the video game industry where amazing advances were being made in the level of graphics and player functionality and sports games seemed to get better and better all the time. We were junkies to this movement and couldn’t wait to get our hands on the next new game. There were so many other games that the Nintendo era brought into our lives. I remember the first time we played NES Open golf. This game became our whole lives for a good 6 months. It was essentially a golf game where you would use characters from the Super Mario world. The level of interaction and the gameplay became addictive and we could actually play tournaments.
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Little did I realize at that point, we were only just seeing the tip of the iceberg and the sports gaming industry was about to go to a whole new level. We were about to be part of a gaming revolution that would see game quality increase exponentially and lead to a platform where fantasy meets reality. Stay tuned for the next installment of this two-part series on the evolution of sports video games.
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Also look forward to some fun and interesting reviews of some of these sports games by our resident game reviewer 
What were some of your favourite sports games as a kid? Are there some really old ones that you remember being so bad but so much fun at the time? I have only mentioned a small number of games here and would love to hear your comments about the sports games you loved.
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