Archive for September, 2008
Sports Games: Electric Football
By Stephen Turk
A key factor in the creation and purpose of a sports game is simulation. Different games do this different ways, but miniaturizing the sport is an effective way to do this. As such, one would be remiss not to include one of the strangest, yet most entrancing sports games ever created. That game is electric football.
1947 saw Tudor Games release what was essentially a vibrating table on which little football men would move around.
Electric football was a very interesting game because there really is no way play a game, as there was absolutely no way to control the players. There was a dial to intesify or quell the vibration of the field, and the players had tabs on their bases which could control their speed, but that was about the extent of it. Players also broke any number of football rules, including illegal contact, illegal block in the back, excessive spinning, off-sides, and scoring in the wrong end zone amongst others. Still, in its heyday the game sold an incredible amount and is admired to this day.
Sports Games: Stickball
While legions of people occupy their virtual sports time with video games, it’s interesting to look at just how far the simulation of sports has come. For nearly as long as professional sports have been popular, people have found ways to shrink them down in to related, yet entirely different, games and simulations.
So starts a series in which I will look back at what we can call “sports games.” While clearly a redundant title, a sports game, simply put, is a game based off of an organized sport.
Chronologically speaking, the first thing I could think of was stickball. Now, you may be thinking “hold on, that isn’t a simulation, that’s a sport,” but I include it here because while it may be closer to an actual sport than say a sports toy, the game is an adaptation. The important thing is that it embraces the imagination, which is the entire basis of a sports game.
I missed the stickball era, and as a suburban kid, I had little league and grassy fields to play around in. As such I’m even more fascinated with all the ins and outs and the shear inguinity and resilance of the game. I mean check out that photo, there’s that intangible charm that comes from legions of babies playing on cobbled roads. That wagon is no slouch either.
A Match Made in the Airwaves Part II
By Stephen Turk
So it’s football season now, and that means all attention in the sports world goes there. I’m not complaining, I love football, but I don’t imagine that while watching the first nationally televised football game, too many people were downing hot wings, wearing replica jersey
s, or were able to see the game on a 160 inch high definition screen. But on December 28, 1958 those seeds were sown.
And that is really one of the most interesting things about that game that endures. What we can do now is look back at the timeline of professional football and pickout the moment things started to really come together.
The 1958 game has a lot going for it, especially in the whole “t.v. made the NFL what it is today” argument. There’s simply too much to talk about concerning the game itself, so we’ll skip the whole thing for now, and get to it at some point in the future. The take home point is that the game gave the country the very first NFL overtime in its first nationally televised game. The nation got to experience the excitement of sudden death together.
For decades the league had been trying to establish itself. What they needed was a medium, a grand stage to show that professional football could be just as enthralling as baseball, college football, and boxing. I mean, people wouldn’t go around painting themselves up as they do today if the product wasn’t worth it.
A Match Made in the Airwaves Part I
By Stephen Turk
As I sat on Sunday watching football, with a nacho cheese globule running down my replica jersey, a dwindling pitcher of beer, and in the midst of an important conversation with my friends as we discussed what food we would order at half time, I had the most painfully obvious epiphany. Football and television is truly the most successful marriage in sports.
So as I dug into some potato skins, I wondered, how did we get here? Clearly the NFL is top dog in the American sports world today, and while that has certainly been the trend for several years, the figures back it up in no uncertain fashion. A recent Forbes article found that the average NFL team is worth over a billion dollars. While that figure is impressive in its own right, the average MLB club is worth just 
under 500 million, less than half.
None of this is particularly provacative, saying television helped make the NFL what it is today is like saying the sky is blue or college basketball is better than the NBA. But what makes the relationship far more interesing is the context and the story around the thing.
As stated above, the prevalence of professional football and the prevalence of the television go hand in hand. What we call the NFL today had rather meager beginnings.
