Super Action Football

Coleco

The next step in football gaming was provided by a company once called the Connecticut Leather Company. Coleco entered the console systems market in the summer of 1982, following a lengthy period on the sidelines after the failure of its Telstar-labeled version of Pong in 1976. ColecoVision arrived in June amidst much fanfare and a number of exclusive, high-profile arcade game licenses that included Donkey Kong, Venture, and Carnival.

Licensing such hot properties and providing consumers with near-perfect home versions of these quarter-a-play favorites made the system a huge early success. Coleco neatly positioned itself to steal customers away from both Atari and Intellivision, the former by grabbing up the licenses that had become its bread and butter and the latter by developing a lineup of premium sports games. The company played on its experience as a manufacturer of top-selling handheld titles, such as Electronic Quarterback and Head-to-Head Baseball, to move into this arena with confidence. When 1983 rolled around, the ColecoVision was rapidly becoming the top system for electronic athletes.

Coleco's "Super Action" series of sports games was anchored by Super Action Football. This title was intended to represent the next stage in football gaming, both as an arcade twitchfest and as a strategic experience. The look of the game was entirely new, shifting from the flat, straight-on camera angle of its rivals to a 3D isometric aspect that gave it more of a TV broadcast appearance. Players were drawn with multiple colors for the first time, and there were more of them than even before--a whopping eight on each side. It even included a little referee in a striped shirt. All the standard football rules and conventions were there, from going out of bounds to kicking field goals and fumbling the ball.

Coleco gave us a new perspective on the gridiron.

But although Super Action Football looked very good, it wasn't very playable. For starters, it required an added investment in the Super Action Controllers that came with Super Action Baseball. These huge and rather expensive devices were a compromise between the traditional, Atari-inspired joystick and the Intellivision-like standard Coleco gamepad, with a big red knob, a trackball roller, and a keypad topping a base with four trigger buttons. Many found these controllers unwieldy--too large and awkward to properly use. Even those who liked the devices didn't appreciate being forced to buy a separate controller just to play one or two sports titles.

No matter what you thought of the controllers, opinion was generally negative on Super Action Football. Although there were more players on the field, you could control only three of them, as linemen were nothing but immobile blocking dummies. Programmers seemed to have bitten off more than they could chew with the overall visual design, as animation was slow and stuttery. Movement was so clumsy that you spent much of each game wondering if the game was actually responding to how you yanked that Super Action joystick back and forth. To make a running back or receiver run faster, you actually had to spin the roller at the same time that you pushed the stick. It wasn't exactly very easy on the hands. Calling a play was roughly equivalent to that seen in Intellivision's NFL Football--with individual patterns for most players--though the poor controls and animations challenged your patience every time you ran one.

Along with all of its rivals, ColecoVision all but died in 1984 as a result of the video game crash. Despite its exceptional technology in comparison with the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision, the system came along too late to make a significant impact on the evolution of the industry--unless you were a serious fan of arcade ports. In terms of football gaming, ColecoVision is barely remembered at all, aside from its dubious contribution to the history of strange joystick design.

Coleco itself reemerged as a toy manufacturer in the later 1980s and made a mint off the Cabbage Patch Doll craze. This sensation didn't help the company stave off bankruptcy, however, and its assets were sold off to former rival Hasbro in 1989. ColecoVision itself survived the death of its parent, however, and systems and games are still being manufactured and sold online by Telegames.