It’s been no secret that I’m a big fan of collecting older sports video games. If you’ve checked out my Collector’s Logs so far, you’ve seen that there’s a definite trend towards the genre as I’ve been upgrading my library of them with better-condition copies. Most collectors absolutely avoid these games, as they often have very little value. Many “hardcore” video game players scoff at the genre.
Me? I lean into it. I have hundreds of sports games in my collection. Hockey. Baseball. Football. Basketball. Soccer. Extreme sports. Olympic sports. Bowling. Boxing. The list goes on.
Why, though? What’s with the sports games? Well… there’s a few reasons.
For starters, sports games were initially an inexpensive and easy way to start building my library. When I began collecting in 2012 with NES, SNES, and Genesis– before moving onto Gen5/Gen6 consoles a couple of years later– sports games were the cheapest finds. Genesis sports games often were found complete in case, and it was possible to find some complete NES and SNES sports games as well without breaking the bank (with money I really didn’t have at the time). I mixed in other genres as I could, of course, but there were visits to game stores when, for $50, I could leave with a dozen sports games.
It’s also important that I’ve been a fan of sports video games for a long time. From playing Hardball! and 4th & Inches on my Commodore 64 in the 1980s, my interest expanded to arcade games, followed by 8-bit and 16-bit sports games as I got into consoles. Madden, NHL Hockey, and later NBA JAM began taking up more of my gaming time. While I wasn’t the best at the simulation games, the arcade games always got my attention. I was playing Arch-Rivals before NBA JAM, and I was getting a kick out of Super High Impact before NFL Blitz would become a thing.
Admittedly, I’m nowhere near being even remotely athletic in reality… so sports games allowed me to play sports with some measure of skill. Throwing a touchdown, scoring a goal, striking out the last batter for a big save… these are all experiences I never could’ve realistically had without playing sports video games. I’ve also learned quite a bit about each sport through playing the games. I learned about green breaks and how elevation affects shots in golf. I learned about how changing speeds while pitching can be effective. I learned how offsides calls work in hockey– something I never could wrap my head around while watching on TV.
It’s also fun for me to compare the different sports games of their eras. I can look at NFL GameDay and NFL 2K and stack them up against the Madden offerings of the time. I can experience the evolution of franchises like Sony’s MLB games, from Pennant Race through The Show. I can give time to overlooked games like FOX Sports NHL Championship 2000 and ESPN NFL PrimeTime 2002. I can measure the progress (or regression) of presentation value– which is a very unique thing I focus on, perhaps more than any other fan of the genre. It was easy for people who weren’t fans of sports games to call yearly releases mere “roster upgrades”, but to a more experienced player, improvements and changes can be analyzed. Modes are added, gameplay focus can shift, rule changes are implemented, and more can change from year to year.
Unless I add another console(s) to my collection, I probably have most of the sports games I could possibly land. I won’t lie– I’ve given consideration to jumping back onto the Genesis collecting train, just for that console’s sports games.
But that’s a topic for another time.
Pete's Perspective 
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