American football reached video games early and awkwardly. Atari's arcade Football of 1978 had two players spinning trackballs to push X's and O's up a scrolling field, and for a decade the sport stayed that abstract because the hardware could not draw eleven players a side doing anything recognizable. John Madden Football changed the ambition in 1988, with a full playbook, honest down-and-distance football and a coach who reportedly refused to lend his name to anything with fewer than eleven on the field, and Tecmo Bowl changed the fun a year later on the NES, with real player names, four plays a side and a run game people still argue about. The sport translates to a screen differently than most. It is not continuous. It is a chain of discrete plays, each one a decision made before the snap and a few seconds of execution after it, which is why it has always suited both the tactician and the person who just wants to throw deep on first down.
The genre divides three ways rather than two. The licensed simulations model playbooks, position-by-position ratings, injuries, the salary cap and a franchise mode that can run for decades of seasons; Madden and the NFL 2K series fought that ground for years until an exclusive NFL license, signed at the end of 2004, settled it in EA's favor. The arcade games keep the shape of the sport and throw out the rulebook, so NFL Blitz has no penalties and late hits are the point, and Mutant League Football adds landmines. The third strand never takes the field at all: the front-office and coaching games, where you draft, scout, negotiate and set a depth chart, then watch the results come in as box scores. All three share the same furniture. A roster rated by position, a play chosen from a book before every snap, a defense trying to guess it, four downs to move ten yards, a clock that turns the last two minutes into a different game, and a season that funnels toward one weekend in February.
This collection gathers the titles in our catalog that carry the Football (American) tag, from licensed simulations to arcade gridiron and the management games that live entirely in menus. It covers the American sport only; association football has its own home in our Football (Soccer) collection. If you have ever called a screen pass on third and long because you knew the blitz was coming, start here.
