Blades of Steel

About Blades of Steel

Blades of Steel (1987) is Konami's ice hockey game for arcades and the NES, known for its fast action and its fistfights, in which the loser goes to the penalty box, and a million-seller on Nintendo's console.

Blades of Steel in Depth

Players choose exhibition matches against the computer or a friend, or a playoff-style tournament for the Cup, at Junior, College or Pro difficulty. Eight fictional teams represent cities that had NHL teams at the time, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Edmonton in Canada and New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Minnesota in the US, each with three forwards, two defencemen and a goaltender. Fights start when two players bump into each other three times in a row. In the stand-off, a player who punches rapidly may knock his opponent down with no penalty; if both throw punches, a voice yells "fight" and a fight screen appears, where players punch and block high and low with five hits of health. The loser goes to the penalty box, and up to four players can be sent off, for a 5-on-1 advantage, while a fight near a net may bring a penalty shot. Tied games go to a five-shot shoot-out and then sudden death.

There is no offside rule, and only two penalties are called besides icing: the two minutes for losing a fight and penalty shots, taken from the blue line like a football penalty. Voice samples, rare in NES games, announce "Blades of Steel!", "Faceoff", "Fight" and the garbled passing call, which the clearer arcade version confirms as "Get the pass".

Making Blades of Steel

Konami released Blades of Steel in North American arcades in 1987 and ported it to the Famicom Disk System and NES in 1988; the arcade version has more voice samples and commentary thanks to better speech hardware and more memory. It sold over a million copies and was well received, Allgame's Skyler Miller calling it "one of the most enjoyable sports games of its era". Reviews of the Virtual Console release were mostly positive, Nintendo Life finding it had aged better than Konami's other NES sports games such as Double Dribble, though Eurogamer's Dan Whitehead found the graphics poor even by 1987 standards, with the same player model repeated and garish colours to tell teams apart. Two sequels followed a decade later, NHL Blades of Steel '99 for the Nintendo 64 and NHL Blades of Steel 2000 for the PlayStation, with Game Boy Color versions by Climax Studios.