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http://www.gamespot.com/features/6130024/index.html
By Brian Ekberg
Design by Collin Oguro
The NFL football world looked a lot differently in 1999 than it does in 2005. Compared to today's Madden-only NFL world, the late '90s might seem like a relative embarrassment of riches, with six established NFL games either already released or soon to hit store shelves that year. Nonetheless, despite all these choices, things were getting stale on the gridiron. The Blitz series was an already-established alternative to the more sim-style games such as GameDay and Madden. And while NFL Blitz 2000 was a strong game, it certainly wasn't the zenith of the cycle. Meanwhile, Microsoft's NFL Fever franchise was a worthy, if underwhelming, series on a platform that casual sports gamers were increasingly ignoring in droves--the PC. And while games like Madden, QB Club, and GameDay were pretty solid games in and of themselves, there was no question that the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 consoles were getting more than a little long in the tooth. If it wasn't an explicitly expressed sentiment by football gamers, it was certainly implied. People were ready for something new.
Sega had just that in mind with the release of its Sega Dreamcast console and the first in an all-new series of football games: NFL 2K. The Visual Concepts-developed football game sent shock waves through the sports-gaming industry in the late '90s by boasting features, gameplay, sound, and, most prominently, a visual quality that had frankly never been seen before in a console football game.
Save perhaps for Soul Calibur, there was no more-visually-arresting example of the Dreamcast's pixel-pumping power than NFL 2K. Never before had players in a console video football game looked better, animated more realistically, or moved with such a sense of purpose and loving detail. Certainly the Dreamcast's raw power had plenty to do with it, but harnessing that processing clout was a team of developers determined to wring as much power from Sega's swirly console as possible. The result was a graphical package that included hands grasping for balls, individual mesh holes in jerseys, and detailed laces on the spine of the officially licensed footballs. The tackle animations alone were unique. Who could forget the seemingly ubiquitous shoestring tackle, when a defender would grab your runner by the foot just as you thought you had a clear lane. Legend has it that famed film director (and annual E3 attendee) Steven Spielberg was "stunned" the first time he saw NFL 2K in action. This was high praise indeed, considering Spielberg is known for stunning audiences with his own cutting-edge visual work
NFL 2K would have been an interesting side note in the annals of football gaming history had it merely been a visual feast, however. Luckily for gamers everywhere, those intense visuals were backed up by sterling gameplay and features that were utterly unique to the console on which the game appeared. Take the visual memory unit, for instance. Sega's quirky and cute memory cards acted not only as memory units on which you could save your game, but also as important supplements to one of the core aspects of any football game: playcalling. Instead of your cheating buddy watching the screen to see what play you called, you could slyly scroll through your playbook and choose the play of your choice...and your buddy would be none the wiser. In fact, it wasn't that far removed from real football, because the VMUs didn't show play diagrams, so you were forced to memorize the plays themselves based only on their names. It's the closest many of us armchair quarterbacks have ever come to studying a playbook like Peyton or Tom. The downside? VMUs were costly, and an NFL 2K save pretty much hogged the entire memory capacity of a unit, leaving little room for your Ready 2 Rumble boxer or CART Flag to Flag championship save files.
Little touches grabbed us from the outset. For instance, we loved how the plays were superimposed on the field when using regular old non-VMU playcalling, as this made it a snap to see exactly where your wide receiver would break on an out route or precisely which offensive linemen your running back would need to squeeze on a running play. The commentary alone was worthy of an award, if for no other reason than that it showed gamers what a booth team could sound like when it actually worked together. With all due respect to the venerable John Madden and his then-boothmate Pat Summerall, those two had been phoning it in for years. "Dan Stevens" and "Peter O'Keefe," the play-by-play and color commentary team in the NFL 2K booth from the start, gave insightful, context-friendly, and, yes, even funny commentary on nearly every aspect of the action on the field. It was clear the Visual Concepts team was clearly thinking broadcast quality from the get-go with this pairing, as the audio, coupled with the already stellar visuals, made for a fantastic experience. And, no, you can't coach that.
Innovative touches, such as the playbook superimposed on the field, really set NFL 2K apart.
In a way, NFL 2K was both the beginning of a new football journey--the first football game that demonstrated what the next generation of consoles would be capable of--and a finale of sorts, as the game's appearance on the network-enabled Dreamcast signaled the end of the strictly offline nature of console football releases. NFL 2K1 would be the first Sega sports game to make good on the network promise, but this was still ahead of the competition. It would take Sony, Microsoft, and EA Sports a few years to get their respective online acts together, but the message was clear: Sports games were heading toward an established online presence like that found on SegaNet (as it would come to be known), and publishers would ignore this trend at their own peril.
NFL 2K was the product of a company truly making the most out of a console's next-generation hardware capabilities, and it was one of the all-time best examples of a developer delivering a game that looked like something from the future. It was a shot over the bow of Sega's competitors in the sports world, and it was a wake-up call to the "big three" console makers: Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. With NFL 2K, Sega truly declared that the next generation was here and that a brand-new battle for the hearts and minds of football gamers was about to begin.
NEXT: GameSpot editors share their fond memories of NFL 2K
By Brian Ekberg
Design by Collin Oguro
The NFL football world looked a lot differently in 1999 than it does in 2005. Compared to today's Madden-only NFL world, the late '90s might seem like a relative embarrassment of riches, with six established NFL games either already released or soon to hit store shelves that year. Nonetheless, despite all these choices, things were getting stale on the gridiron. The Blitz series was an already-established alternative to the more sim-style games such as GameDay and Madden. And while NFL Blitz 2000 was a strong game, it certainly wasn't the zenith of the cycle. Meanwhile, Microsoft's NFL Fever franchise was a worthy, if underwhelming, series on a platform that casual sports gamers were increasingly ignoring in droves--the PC. And while games like Madden, QB Club, and GameDay were pretty solid games in and of themselves, there was no question that the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 consoles were getting more than a little long in the tooth. If it wasn't an explicitly expressed sentiment by football gamers, it was certainly implied. People were ready for something new.
Sega had just that in mind with the release of its Sega Dreamcast console and the first in an all-new series of football games: NFL 2K. The Visual Concepts-developed football game sent shock waves through the sports-gaming industry in the late '90s by boasting features, gameplay, sound, and, most prominently, a visual quality that had frankly never been seen before in a console football game.
Save perhaps for Soul Calibur, there was no more-visually-arresting example of the Dreamcast's pixel-pumping power than NFL 2K. Never before had players in a console video football game looked better, animated more realistically, or moved with such a sense of purpose and loving detail. Certainly the Dreamcast's raw power had plenty to do with it, but harnessing that processing clout was a team of developers determined to wring as much power from Sega's swirly console as possible. The result was a graphical package that included hands grasping for balls, individual mesh holes in jerseys, and detailed laces on the spine of the officially licensed footballs. The tackle animations alone were unique. Who could forget the seemingly ubiquitous shoestring tackle, when a defender would grab your runner by the foot just as you thought you had a clear lane. Legend has it that famed film director (and annual E3 attendee) Steven Spielberg was "stunned" the first time he saw NFL 2K in action. This was high praise indeed, considering Spielberg is known for stunning audiences with his own cutting-edge visual work
NFL 2K would have been an interesting side note in the annals of football gaming history had it merely been a visual feast, however. Luckily for gamers everywhere, those intense visuals were backed up by sterling gameplay and features that were utterly unique to the console on which the game appeared. Take the visual memory unit, for instance. Sega's quirky and cute memory cards acted not only as memory units on which you could save your game, but also as important supplements to one of the core aspects of any football game: playcalling. Instead of your cheating buddy watching the screen to see what play you called, you could slyly scroll through your playbook and choose the play of your choice...and your buddy would be none the wiser. In fact, it wasn't that far removed from real football, because the VMUs didn't show play diagrams, so you were forced to memorize the plays themselves based only on their names. It's the closest many of us armchair quarterbacks have ever come to studying a playbook like Peyton or Tom. The downside? VMUs were costly, and an NFL 2K save pretty much hogged the entire memory capacity of a unit, leaving little room for your Ready 2 Rumble boxer or CART Flag to Flag championship save files.
Little touches grabbed us from the outset. For instance, we loved how the plays were superimposed on the field when using regular old non-VMU playcalling, as this made it a snap to see exactly where your wide receiver would break on an out route or precisely which offensive linemen your running back would need to squeeze on a running play. The commentary alone was worthy of an award, if for no other reason than that it showed gamers what a booth team could sound like when it actually worked together. With all due respect to the venerable John Madden and his then-boothmate Pat Summerall, those two had been phoning it in for years. "Dan Stevens" and "Peter O'Keefe," the play-by-play and color commentary team in the NFL 2K booth from the start, gave insightful, context-friendly, and, yes, even funny commentary on nearly every aspect of the action on the field. It was clear the Visual Concepts team was clearly thinking broadcast quality from the get-go with this pairing, as the audio, coupled with the already stellar visuals, made for a fantastic experience. And, no, you can't coach that.
Innovative touches, such as the playbook superimposed on the field, really set NFL 2K apart.
In a way, NFL 2K was both the beginning of a new football journey--the first football game that demonstrated what the next generation of consoles would be capable of--and a finale of sorts, as the game's appearance on the network-enabled Dreamcast signaled the end of the strictly offline nature of console football releases. NFL 2K1 would be the first Sega sports game to make good on the network promise, but this was still ahead of the competition. It would take Sony, Microsoft, and EA Sports a few years to get their respective online acts together, but the message was clear: Sports games were heading toward an established online presence like that found on SegaNet (as it would come to be known), and publishers would ignore this trend at their own peril.
NFL 2K was the product of a company truly making the most out of a console's next-generation hardware capabilities, and it was one of the all-time best examples of a developer delivering a game that looked like something from the future. It was a shot over the bow of Sega's competitors in the sports world, and it was a wake-up call to the "big three" console makers: Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. With NFL 2K, Sega truly declared that the next generation was here and that a brand-new battle for the hearts and minds of football gamers was about to begin.
NEXT: GameSpot editors share their fond memories of NFL 2K