HUNTSVILLE — The year is 1993, and Bill Walsh College Football is released for the Sega Genesis.
College football has come to a home video game console for the first time ever. The game does not have an official NCAA license, so sprinkled among the non-trademark state schools like Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee are exotic names like Provo, College Station, Pullman and State College.
The 12-year-old version of your columnist had no clue what Provo, Pullman or State College meant, but through uniform colors and roster numbers, I was able to piece the puzzle together. State College was blue and white with #12 playing quarterback, #32 at running back and they were very hard to beat. That must be Kerry Collins and Ki-Jana Carter, thus State College was Penn State and State College must be the city where the university is. After enough time, I was able to figure out that BYU was in Provo, WAZZU was in Pullman, and State College is where you would find Texas A&M. The video game was teaching me the actual game.
For the next two decades, NCAA Football would continue to teach young kids the finer points of college football. The only reason that I know the Foy-ODK Sportsmanship Trophy is given to the winner of the Iron Bowl is because of the game. I know that a screen pass is a great way to beat a blitz because of the game. I love Lamanski Hall. And that’s because of college football video games. I became much more aware of teams not named the Crimson Tide because of these games. I think (incorrectly) that I could definitely do a better job than most any offensive coordinator because of the video game.
The series was an important landmark in the overall growth in popularity of college football for a generation of fans, but it went dark after NCAA Football 14 was released. Why did it, a very popular video game franchise, fall away nine years ago? It was due to three words that are today’s hottest college football topic: Name, Image, and Likeness. Champion UCLA Bruin, Ed O’Bannon won an antitrust class action lawsuit against the NCAA. The fallout saw the game’s producer, EA Sports stop production of its basketball and football games due to the results of the lawsuit as it would no longer be financially viable to produce the games and have to pay for use of the athlete’s likenesses.
The next generation of would-be college football fans missed out on the hands-on experience of building a virtual dynasty, managing promises to digital recruits, scheduling opponents, and learning the blocking schemes of an RPO, hands-on.
EA Sports threw all their efforts behind their NFL offering and their Madden franchise became a dominant force in the industry. Obviously, the business of college football is doing just fine, but the loss of the video game series has had an impact on the way that I view the players themselves.
During the video game’s heyday, I was much more familiar with actual players because I spent so much time with their digital counterparts. In the game’s dynasty mode, you play with the same team for season after season so the freshmen class would grow to seniors at my fingertips.
True devotees could even edit players’ names to be direct copies of the real roster. Sitting with a paper copy of a roster and using a directional pad to enter some 50 names into a 16-bit console creates a certain bond between the video game player and the human player that the sprites represent.
Trying to take a team in the Mountain West to a national title makes you acutely aware of just how hard it can be to go into Fresno and leave with a victory. I have nightmares about how hard it was to cover Louisville’s #9 (Joshua Trench) in the 2005 version of the game and to this day, if I call my college roommate and ask who the best receiver in football ever was, he is going to reply “That bad #9.”
Fans of college football video games wait with bated breath as to the revival of the franchise. We’ve been promised a new title in 2023. In the video game industry, college sports, and life, however, promises are made to be broken.
If not for me, I hope to see new NCAA Football video games on our screens soon for a new generation of fans.
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