Tecmo Super Bowl

About Tecmo Super Bowl

Tecmo Super Bowl (1991) is Tecmo's NES football game, the first licensed by both the NFL and its players' union, with every team and real players, and the subject of a lasting cult of tournaments and roster mods.

Tecmo Super Bowl in Depth

Earlier games used either real teams, real players or fictional substitutes, never real teams and players together. Tecmo Bowl had only a players' association licence, with twelve teams and short rosters, because LJN held an exclusive NFL team licence for its own NES game. For Tecmo Super Bowl, Tecmo secured both, making it the first and only NES game with real NFL teams and players. It offers the complete league of 28 teams, expanded rosters and playbooks, and statistics tracking including NFL records. Although released late in 1991, its rosters and attributes come from the 1990-91 season, so there are no 1991 rookies or off-season moves. Jim Kelly, Randall Cunningham and Bernie Kosar, not part of the players' union marketing deal, appear as QB Bills, QB Eagles and QB Browns.

Its Bo Jackson became infamous for speed and agility so extreme that players claimed he could run 1,000 yards in a game; TechTimes called him "absolutely, positively—and absurdly—unstoppable", and players regarded using him as close to cheating. Lawrence Taylor was used the same way on defence. ESPN and USA Today called Jackson the "greatest video game athlete of all-time", and two 2016 Kia Sorento commercials starring Jackson played on the joke.

Making Tecmo Super Bowl

Tecmo developed and published Tecmo Super Bowl in North America and Japan in 1991 as the sequel to 1987's Tecmo Bowl. It was a major success, and in 1997 EGM and IGN each named it among the top 100 games of all time; GamesRadar later noted it may be the only NES football game still widely played. Tecmo followed it with 16-bit versions for the SNES and Genesis in 1993, which fixed many bugs and added weather, punt blocks and in-game playbook changes, then Tecmo Super Bowl II and III and a 1996 PlayStation version, the last with both licences before EA's 2004 exclusive deal for Madden forced later Tecmo Bowl games to use generic players. With emulation, it has become one of the most modified NES games, with annual roster updates for college and professional football, online leagues and national tournaments, and an NFL Films Presents episode on the annual championship in Madison, Wisconsin, featured interviews with Emmitt Smith, Christian Okoye and Philip Rivers.