NFL GameDay

989 Sports (Sony)

Being in the right place at the right time can be a godsend in the gaming world. And no game better exemplifies that maxim than NFL GameDay, which arrived for the Sony PlayStation at the exact moment that the console system began to take off in 1995. Both it and Resident Evil provided Sony with a one-two punch that made every self-respecting gamer want to own a PlayStation. Not long after this, nearly everyone did. Such massive retail success in turn helped spawn a football gaming phenomenon that continues to this day.

That there was something special about GameDay was obvious from the very beginning. No previous game had so winningly balanced arcade action with realism, coupling unprecedented depth of control with a depiction of the NFL that was above and beyond what similar titles had offered in the preceding years. Even the worthy likes of Tecmo Super Bowl didn't play anything like the first GameDay. The biggest part of the game's appeal was the ability to get into the trenches and muck it up with actions that were completely under your control. 989 Sports designers made sure that gamers could use all eight primary buttons on the PlayStation gamepads, giving them the opportunity to juke, hurdle, leap forward, perform a swim move, and even stiff-arm left and right. Controls were dead-on, affording a feeling of direct involvement that made you a little tired by the end of each game. This lent a real jolt of adrenaline to the proceedings and helped make GameDay a fantastic multiplayer game. Taking on a friend had never been so much fun.

GameDay 97 was a great play in its time.

And GameDay was about more than just smashmouth football. Sony used its cash reserves to great effect here, buying the full NFL license, complete with all of the franchises and official logos, more than 1,000 real players and stats, authentic stadiums, and team-specific playbooks. It also came packed with lots of visual chrome. Television-style presentation reached a new height with varied camera angles and an overall graphical sharpness that put rivals to shame. Player uniforms were letter-perfect, as were such added elements as end zone art and people in the crowd. Animation was also very good, hinting at the widespread use of motion capture that was waiting in the wings.

Acclaim brought the series to the PC in 1998.

GameDay's impact was a primary reason behind the PlayStation's victory over the Sega Saturn as the console system of choice for sports gamers. Despite the early head start granted to the Saturn as the successor to the sportscentric Sega Genesis, its sports lineup paled in comparison with the one being developed by Sony. GameDay led the way here, forging a strong franchise that would go on to become a solid number two next to the Madden series. It also blazed the way for Acclaim's NFL Quarterback Club, which arrived in 1996 for the PlayStation with a few interesting features, including historical situation play (later incorporated into Madden). That series has lasted until the present, branching out to other systems including the Sega Dreamcast and the Nintendo 64, but always remaining a poor man's alternative to at least one other series.

Subsequent releases in the GameDay line boosted the quality every year. NFL GameDay 97 added more camera angles, motion capture, and a draft, while the '98 edition incorporated a new 3D graphical engine complete with smoothly animated polygonal players--a major achievement in programming at the time. The '99 edition was perhaps the best ever, the impressive graphics engine of the previous year allowing 989 Sports to concentrate on AI tweaks that improved the realism. This version of the game was even ported to the PC, though the experiment was abandoned almost immediately. In subsequent years, the advancing age of the PlayStation made itself known. While both the 2000 and 2001 models of GameDay were still quite good--the 2000 edition even included a general manager career mode and a play editor--they seemed to be a little behind the times in a way that was hard to define.

The series just never lived up to its promise in the PS2 era.

The NFL GameDay series was poised to enter a new era with its first "real" release on the PlayStation 2 (GameDay 2001 was released for the system, but it was just a no-frills port of the PlayStation game). Unfortunately, the GameDay series seemingly never really got comfortable on the PS2, and despite the publisher releasing four games for the next-generation console, none seemed to make much of a dent in the hearts and minds of football gamers.

Almost anything would have been better than the anemic 2001 edition of GameDay. So when GameDay 2002 came a knockin', gamers were eager to see what a football game designed by Sony people--specifically with the PS2 in mind--could do. The answer: a bug-filled effort that saw virtual offensive players sometimes running plays directly from the huddle and defensive backs that were basically ineffectual when it came to stopping deep balls. And though online play had already been around for a while, thanks to games like NFL 2K1 for the Dreamcast and Madden 2003 for the PS2, NFL GameDay 2003 finally included networked play of its own. And if the game didn't really excel with its online features, at the very least it didn't do anything to horribly screw them up either.

GameDay 2004 doomed the franchise.

The final entry in the GameDay series came in 2003, with the release of NFL GameDay 2004. Featuring the touchdown machine LaDanian Tomlinson on its cover, the game bolstered its online feature set with a more complete set of community tools, such as a message board and e-mail functionality. Unfortunately, neither online play nor LT himself would be enough to rescue the game from being another disappointing effort. Nearly every aspect of the gridiron action had problems in the 2004 version, from brain-dead defensive linemen that couldn't chase down a one-legged Peyton Manning, to defensive backs that refused to move out of pass coverage during run plays.

To Sony's credit, the company recognized the problems with its football franchise long before EA Sports forced the rest of the industry's hand with its exclusive licensing deal. The death knell for the GameDay franchise came in May of 2004, when Sony announced that several of its sports games--including GameDay, the company's college football series (NCAA GameBreaker), and its two basketball franchises--would skip the 2004/2005 season. This announcement was made just a month after Microsoft had made a similar decision to cut and run from its XSN venture (and from the NFL Fever series as well). This was foresight indeed, as just a handful of months later, EA Sports' announcement of an exclusive license with the NFL ensured that 989 Sports wouldn't be back in the football business anytime soon.

Or would it? In April of 2005, the newly renamed SCEA Sports Studio announced an entirely new football game, dubbed Road to Sunday, that aimed to look at football from an entirely new angle. For more on Road to Sunday, check out the sidebar above.