#oneaday Day 636: The Tragedy of Sports Games

A mildly interesting thought occurred to me while I was buttering my bagel five minutes ago. (No, that's not a euphemism). And that is that sports games are not what they used to be.

This might sound blindingly obvious, but let me talk you through my thought process.

I've been revisiting quite a lot of sports games through the Atari A to Z Flashback series in particular, and I tend to dread the prospect of them, but actually end up quite enjoying a lot of them. In the case of 2600 games, this is often because the games in question only bear a passing resemblance to the sport they're supposedly simulating and are instead designed as "fun video games".

But that's not all. Recently on Atari ST A to Z, I covered Epyx's Winter Games, and I was reminded how much I liked that series of games back on the Atari 8-bit and ST. And this evening, on a whim I decided to boot up Vancouver 2010, the official video game of the 2010 Winter Olympics. I had a blast with it!

I even — don't tell anyone — had a good time with at least one installment of FIFA back in the day. Specifically, the World Cup '98 incarnation on the N64, which I picked up as part of my failed attempts to "get into football" and fit in a bit better with my peers. World Cup '98 was, again, just a fun video game — albeit one that bore rather more of a resemblance to the game of football than Championship Soccer on 2600 did.

In recent years, it feels like the sports games, particularly those that have become annualised, have lost sight of the things that made games like the NHL series on the Mega Drive great — they were fun video games first and foremost; the kind of thing you could throw on when you had friends over, and you'd have a great time trash-talking and competing against one another.

These days, the sports games are their publishers' cash cows. Not only do they release versions with marginally incremental improvements each year — along with the odious "Legacy Edition" practice they've been doing on Switch, which I won't get into now — but they riddle the damn things with microtransactions. FIFA has its Ultimate Team mode, for example, which is a fun idea in theory until you consider quite how much money you could end up investing in it if you decide to take it seriously. And one of the basketball games in recent years attracted a ton of controversy for featuring a casino mode. What happened to, y'know, basketball?

I dunno. These games don't feel like they're about getting a few friends over to have some fun any more; like so many other things, it feels like they're more about trying to assert your dominance online, brag about your "achievements" (when said achievements more than likely actually mostly came about from throwing your money at things) and then quietly buy the next, near-identical game the following year because no-one will play the old one online any more.

I really enjoyed my brief time with Vancouver 2010 this evening. It's a fun, simple, arcade-style winter sports game that I can see being immensely fun with multiple players involved. If hanging out in person ever becomes a thing again, I'm definitely going to give it a shot with some friends — along with some of the other Olympics games I've found myself collecting for 50p a pop in recent months!

You won't catch me buying any of the modern sports games, though. For me, they represent the very worst of the modern games industry — and they don't even look like fun video games that anyone can pick up any more!