What Games to Play to Prepare for Super Bowl Sunday
The Super Bowl airs this Sunday, bringing fans from across the United States together to view one of the country’s favorite sporting events. The love of football has been inextricably linked with gaming since the sport began appearing in video games during the late 1980s. If you are looking to play some of the best football games out there and want to reach outside the most recent Madden, we have a few ideas. You might even be able to combine these suggestions with Extra Life fundraising by throwing together impromptu buy-in charity tournaments for your friends and family to get everyone excited for the big game!
Football’s Influence on Gaming
You can’t get much farther outside the realm of normal football while still maintaining the core of the sport than Mutant League Football. Set in a far-flung and irradiated future, humanity has mutated into a variety of new forms and the dead have begun to rise again. Oh, and aliens invaded at one point. All of this makes football incredibly dangerous, with fields littered with mines, pit traps, and holes into the cold vacuum of space. Players have to look out for special team moves that can lob exploding footballs, turn players invisible, or activate jet packs. Killing enough of the opposing team might even cause them to forfeit if they are left with too few players to continue on. Creative players can even orchestrate the death of a hostile referee in one of the many hazards on the field. Released on the Sega Genesis and the PlayStation Portable, Mutant League Football stands out as a must-play if you are looking to spice up your football-related gaming sessions.
After a series of duds in the 1990s, Visual Concepts was brought to Dreamcast to develop a new NFL franchise for the system under the watch of the Sega Sports brand. The team created NFL 2K, one of the most well-received football games at the time. Though the PlayStation 2 signaled the death knell of the Dreamcast, Visual Concepts’ series continued under Sega’s software publishing arm for PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Due to launching with the PlayStation 2, EA’s Madden franchise held supremacy during the early 2000s. So strong was EA’s hold on the digital football space that not even the addition of the ESPN branding seemed able to change that for Visual Concepts. This state of affairs continued for several years… until NFL 2K5. Incredible graphics that included a first-person mode and a polished presentation mimicking television broadcasts mixed with a mind-boggling price point of $19.99 USD. This created a word-of-mouth buzz around the title that helped turn it into a legend. The success of the game was so great that EA dropped its price on Madden and was barely able to move as many copies as ESPN NFL 2K5. This spooked the publishing giant to such a degree that it pursued an exclusivity deal with the NFL using its superior cash reserves and influence. The deal was rapidly secured, effectively locking out any future entries in the ESPN NFL 2K series.
Tecmo Super Bowl started it all. Released late in 1991, Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES was the first sports video game to cut a deal with the NFL and its players association to bring the names and likenesses of real players into the game. It has been named one of the best games of all-time by game critics as well as the best sports video game of all-time by ESPN. In addition to teams and players from the real world, the sequel to Tecmo Bowl allowed players to go through the full season schedule from 1991, organizes gameplay along more realistic lines, and adds cutscenes for big plays or injuries. To this day, people still compete in tournaments of Tecmo Super Bowl, sometimes with hacked versions of the game that include modern teams and rosters.
NFL Players Give Back to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals
Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals has worked with the NFL for years to bring hope and joy into the lives of kids across the United States. In 2018, Boston Children’s announced that they were given a $14.7 million USD grant from the NFL to study the long-term health complications and possible treatments of concussions, sub-concussive, and other neurological problems. The goal of the research is to find a way to slow the progression of deteriorating neurological issues or outright preventing them.
The NFL’s teams and players do quite a bit in their spare time, too. For example, the San Francisco 49ers had players attend the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Prom. Players danced the night away with the teen patients of the hospital, giving the kids unforgettable memories.
In the words of Kansas City Chief’s safety Tyrann Mathieu, “It’s important to make yourself a part of other people’s lives.” Mathieu and several other players on the Super Bowl bound team visited the University of Kansas Health System last year to spend time with the kids in the hospital’s pediatric unit. The team handed out custom bears, signed pennants, and took selfies with the children they met. The team makes a habit of periodically visiting the kids at Health System to keep themselves involved in the community – and to let the kids know they care.
“It’s important to make yourself a part of other people’s lives.” @Mathieu_Era
Several players and alumni visited @KUHospital yesterday afternoon to visit patients and nurses. pic.twitter.com/HyFDqYiMrp
— Kansas City Chiefs (@Chiefs) May 10, 2019
Don’t forget to sign up for Extra Life to help sick and injured kids in hospitals around the US and Canada by playing games!