Ice Hockey

About Ice Hockey

Ice Hockey (1988) is Nintendo's five-a-side NES hockey game, with three body types of player and brawls that send the loser to the penalty box, often cited as one of the system's best.

Ice Hockey in Depth

The play mirrors the real sport: two teams try to hit a black puck into the opposing goal over three periods, starting each with a face-off at the centre of the rink, and whoever has more goals at the end wins. Teams have five players including the goaltender, rather than six. The rink copies a real arena, with goal lines, attacking and defending zones, face-off spots and a neutral zone, both halves identical. The player picks from three body types for the team: a fast but weak player who excels at face-offs, an all-rounder, and a slow, powerful player who is poor at face-offs but strong at body checking and shooting.

When two opposing players tussle for the puck long enough, others pile in, and the player from the side that loses the fight goes to the penalty box for a time. Electronic Gaming Monthly praised it as having "some of the most hilarious gameplay of any sports game ever" while requiring real skill, noting how fights turn into brawls, crowd noise rises in close games with two minutes left, and varied team members make for strategic play. IGN's Mark Bozon called it the most addictive of Nintendo's early sports titles, saying it was in his NES as often as Super Mario Bros. 3.

Making Ice Hockey

Nintendo R&D4 developed it, with Narumi Nakajima and Hiroaki Hontani of Pax Softnica assisting on programming; Hontani had previously directed Volleyball for Nintendo, a remake of his own Attack Four. Released in 1988, it received positive reviews and is often cited as one of the best NES games. Nintendo Power ranked it 142nd in its Top 200 Nintendo games and IGN included it in its top 100 NES games. GameSpot's Aaron Thomas called the 2006 Wii Virtual Console release "one of those rare NES sports games that's almost as much fun to play today as it was when it was released", and it later returned on Nintendo Switch in 2018.