Yesterday, we looked at five games that threw Hail Mary passes and saw them run back for six the other way, but what about the long shots that landed? Some of the most fun games in the history of sports gaming were borne out of developers who dared to try something completely different. Here are five of our favorite games that aimed big and hit the mark dead on with their sports videogame innovations.
Mutant League Games Asked Why Athletes Couldn’t Maim Each Other
When John Madden lent his name to the Madden series, he did so with the caveat that they needed to create an engine capable of rendering real, 11-on-11 football, as a realistic approach to the game was important to Madden. The developers of Mutant League Football wondered what would happen if you made the players on that engine ghouls, ghosts, and goblins trying to literally tear each other limb from limb on every snap.
The result is a cult classic video game where your star player was as likely to leave riding in a casket as on his teammate’s shoulders. A hockey follow-up came next, along with an animated TV show and a reboot in the 2010s. It’s undeniable that Mutant League Football was just the spinoff content sports videogamers of the ’90s were waiting for.
Rocket League Proved That Human Players Are Overrated
If replacing human players with monster players was a success, what about replacing them with cars? Remote-controlled ones, specifically. That was the pitch behind Rocket League, an online game that puts players in control of RC cars on an enclosed pitch, trying to drive a big ball into the goal to win. Cars can race up the walls and be launched into the air for incredible spinning strikes on the ball, or take each other out with explosive results.
Even those who were optimistic about the concept when they first heard of it likely underestimated just how popular Rocket League would prove to be. The whippy controls made the game instantly fun, while mechanics offered significant room for skill growth as you got more comfortable controlling the RC vehicles.
The result is one of the most successful modern sports games ever. Not only did it create a thriving online community for competitive play in the game’s various player-count options, but it also created a popular eSports one. The intuitive nature for spectators, who can easily gather what is going on and who is winning by applying basic sports knowledge, and fast action has made this a game with proper staying power.
Wii Sports Created A Wave Of Unsuccessful Motion-Controlled Games
True innovation is rare in video games, where the sheer number of games in existence makes it such that nearly anything tried with a design will have existed elsewhere first. Big swings that completely shake up expectations are risky, particularly when they include hardware changes that have the potential to be expensive to develop and dead on arrival when they launch.
When you hit on a big swing, however, you have the potential for something truly memorable, and that’s what Nintendo pulled off with the Wii. While the world of specialized peripherals may have proven to be a mixed bag, with many failed attempts at games using bespoke controllers, Wii Sports was an unqualified success.
What Nintendo pulled off with Wii Sports was not a game-changing level of simulation. While Wiimotes may have had you swinging your arms for real, nobody is arguing that whacking home runs in the derby feels like a more “realistic” baseball game than The Show. Instead, they nailed the landing on minigame after minigame, delivering a collection of sports games that anyone in your family could pick up and enjoy almost instantly for one of the most approachable sports video games ever.
NFL Blitz Is A Perfectly-Realized Relic Of Another Time
The NFL has gone through a reckoning over the last decade in change, as the realities of the effects the game has on the minds and bodies of players have become clearer. As it became clearer that football isn’t just hard on the athletes but was causing even more long-term harm than realized, efforts have been made to tone down adulation of the more violent aspects of the sport.
NFL Blitz is not a game from modern times. It is a game from when the most popular segment on any weekly NFL show was ESPN’s “Jacked Up!” Blitz was a game that fully embraced being an arcade game. Player models were over-the-top muscular monstrosities. Action was rapid fire and dynamic for a game that wasn’t just about the extras, but was also a genuinely fun football experience. Also, you could throw opponents around, pile drive them, and gleefully dogpile to your heart’s content for several seconds after every snap.
Mario Kart Said Everyone Was Ready For This Crossover
It can be easy to look at the decision to make a game starring the beloved characters from your console’s various series as a no-brainer, but Mario Kart becoming the S-tier gaming franchise it is today was no guarantee. When Nintendo decided to make a racing game, there were a lot of ways they could have gone that weren’t “all of our biggest stars riding around on go karts.”
Fortunately for gamers everywhere, that’s the path they chose to follow, and the result is one of the most beloved series in gaming history. From 16-bit to the modern generation, Mario Kart games have been a mainstay on Nintendo consoles, and each new edition has tended to land with much fanfare, only to fully live up to the extremely high hype.
Not only has this big swing paid off, it did so to such an extent it built a genre of licensed kart racers that is not just surviving but thriving, with several of this year’s most well-received sports games being karting games.
