Players slide on the ice, they gain momentum, they bump into each other. Just like EA’s John Madden Football on Genesis a year prior, NHL Hockey wisely uses a vertical view and miraculously depicts something vaguely like real-life physics.

Right around the same time is when Electronic Arts changed hockey gaming forever with the first NHL Hockey on Genesis. It’s supposed to feel more like you’re on ice, but instead makes controlling your players a headache. For the first time (of many), striving for realism got in the way of playability. A familiar cartoony charm, side-view, and simple take on hockey came in 1991 with Sega’s Mario Lemieux Hockey, but it’s a lot less fun than the NES games that influenced it.

Slap Shot on Sega Master System looks like a lesser ripoff of the aforementioned games, and Wayne Gretzky Hockey on NES looks like watching one of those nerdy robot wars from an airplane thousands of feet in the sky.Īnd so we’re onto the 16-bit days and the more powerful technology of the Sega Genesis. The rest of the 8-bit era didn’t produce anything too memorable. Ice Hockey is more cutesy, with its trademark fat, medium, and skinny players and four skaters per team instead of five. Neither game is realistic neither drink is healthy. Blades of Steel is the more realistic of the two, which is like saying Diet Pepsi is healthier than Pepsi. They both have a side view, simple physics, fights, and goalies who move as you press up or down on the D-pad. They’re similar enough that it’s as if one was influenced by the other. Blades of Steel debuted as an arcade in October 1987, but wasn’t released on NES until December 1988, and Ice Hockey showed up in March 1988. So, as far as I’m concerned, the first two hockey games ever were Blades of Steel by Konami and Nintendo’s Ice Hockey, which both get plenty of nostalgia-induced love. To Nintendo’s credit, many of its games were so inventive that it made whatever came before it seem irrelevant, like they had no bearing on the NES itself. I’ve never played an older video game system, and I don’t plan to.

When it comes to video game history lessons, I only go as far back as the original Nintendo.

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