NFL Quarterback Club

Acclaim

Humble beginnings

Acclaim's NFL Quarterback Club series goes back further than you might think, reaching all the way to the Super Nintendo and Sega Saturn days. The first game in the series, NFL Quarterback Club '96, hit the SNES in March of 1995, just a year before the first GameDay would drop for the original PlayStation. The following year, the first and only appearance of the series on the PlayStation occurred with NFL Quarterback Club 97 (this would also be the series' lone appearance on the PC). Beyond some Madden-esque touches, such as a T-meter kicking control and some nicely fluid animations, one of the virtues of QB Club 97 was its historic simulation mode, where players could choose from 50 different classic games and put their own spins on the outcome.

The QB Club franchise came into its own on two of the more downtrodden consoles of their respective generations: the Dreamcast and the Nintendo 64. Both consoles presented unique problems for Acclaim. For N64 games like QB Club '98, '99 and 2000, it meant appealing to gamers on a platform not known for its sports lineup. After some competitive wrangling, the Madden series eventually made its way to the N64 beginning with Madden NFL 99, the first to feature Brett Favre on the cover (he would remain the series' cover athlete throughout its run), providing yet another barrier to success for the QB Club series. To Acclaim's credit, it put up a good fight on Nintendo's final cartridge-based console by steadily improving each of the four iterations of its football series and by peaking with the generally well-received NFL Quarterback Club '99, which featured some of the best-looking graphics ever seen in a football game of its era and some fine multiplayer aspects. Unfortunately, the following year's game wouldn't fare as well, and the series bid a hasty good-bye to the N64 in preparation for moving on to the greener pastures of Sega's burgeoning console.

Green Bay's Brett Favre was a fixture on the series for almost its entirety.

While the Dreamcast versions of QB Club didn't have Madden to contend with, the console did have its own flourishing NFL juggernaut in Sega's NFL 2K franchise, which wowed gamers from the get-go with its stunning debut: NFL 2K. By contrast, Acclaim released a hastily ported version of its final N64 game, NFL Quarterback Club 2000, and the rift in quality between the two games was extremely obvious. Where NFL 2K flourished with dynamic play, great sound, and outstanding graphics, QB Club 2000 floundered with buggy gameplay and flat-out ugly animations. Things improved with the next game in the Dreamcast lineup, QB Club 2001, but only marginally. Receivers still tended to break off routes seemingly at random, and though the game looked better on the second go-around, it still lagged behind the competition.

New consoles and a fresh new outlook greeted gamers with the PS2 and GameCube releases of QB Club 2002, a game that, on the PS2 at least, looked to be turning the franchise in the right direction after several years of missteps. The GameCube version had a notably slower frame rate than the PS2 game, but both featured an updated version of the quarterback challenge mode, which proved to be more consistently challenging and fun than the actual gridiron game itself.

The series fizzled out quietly, kind of like Rich Gannon's career.

Despite initially strong sales in the series, QB Club 2002 would be the final release in the NFL franchise for Acclaim, as it became apparent the company would be unable to keep up with the rapid innovation and consistent quality of the Madden and NFL 2K franchises. Unfortunately, this would only be the start of Acclaim's financial woes. The publisher warned of bankruptcy problems in June of 2004, it lost two of its valuable licenses--Turok and Major League Baseball--after late royalty payments, and it finally shuttered its offices in August 2004. In December, the company put its entire assets up for auction, including its 71,000-square-foot headquarters building in Glen Cove, New York. You can only hope that some ex-Acclaim employees got out with a few Brett Favre-autographed balls and jerseys.