Old School Gaming

[Rory]

Thought this might be a fun thread.

What were some of the earlier sports games you used to play?
Either computer or Board games works.

[Rory]

An Indy 500 board game

[Rory]

Paydirt Football board game

[Rory]

Pennant Race board game

[Rory]

Thinking Mans Football board game

[Alleghenies]

The first computer game I remember was Unnecessary Roughness ('95 I think). It came in a sports pack with NHL '95 when we got our first computer. I remember my brother spending hours and hours on tech support trying to get those games to work in DOS. How easy life is today.

The first table top sports game I played was the football one with vibrating metal which moved the players, I'm drawing a huge blank as to the name of what that is called, but I played that until the motor broke. Shortly after I was introduced to Strat-O-Matic baseball and was lost in baseball since.

[roncollins]

You post-computer game guys don't realize what you're missing:

"Real Games"

- Sports Illustrated baseball
- Sports Illustrated Football (NFL/College)
- Longball
- Foto-electric football
- Electric football
- Speed Circuit (Avalon Hill Grand Prix racing game)
- several others

"Made up games"

- Baseball Card games, built off dice rolls
- Model car racing (every kid in the neighborhood built a real live model race car, then met on a Saturday and raced them with dice rolls and other made-up rules that included crashes)
- Dice-basketball (made with graph paper, a court cut into squares, and outcomes and shooting % listed on each square...it was as much fun to create the courts by hand as it was to play on them ... every kid made their own courts ... leagues were awesome squared)

The investment you made in the infrastructure of these games was remarkable, and the fact that you needed freinds to play them made them social events beyond compare.

[Rory]

lol on made up games Ron. You are jarring some memories right there.

Football
I would get bored in class(4th-6th grades) and made up a football game with my books so the teachers thought I was doing school work.
I'd randomly open the book to a page and if that number was a 7 it was a TD and a 3 was a FG and then I got to open it again til I got a 1-3-9 which would end the quarter for that team. Add up any scores write em down and then it was the next teams turn. Do this for 4 quarters and add up the scores to get the final. I'd have a page for the weeks schedule which then was 14 pages(14 game schedule). And the standings on it's own page. Used up a lot of erasers on the schedules page. lol

Baseball
For baseball I'd take a 7-11 slurpy cup which had baseball players on it then. I'd cut up a couple of pages of squares and wrote 1's and 0's on em. Mostly zero's as you could imagine. It took a lil trial and error to get the right number of "numbered squares" to make the game scores realistic. I'd put em all in the cup and start drawing out a square. If I drew a 1 I got to draw again til I drew a zero which ended the inning for that team. Add up the 1's if any and thats what that team got for that inning. etc.....

Crazy stuff we used to do with dice, paper or whatever we could and a lil imagination eh. lol

Racing
Hell my brother and I used to race marbles on our coffee table. We pick out 20 or so different marbles so we could tell em apart. Then we'd put a phone book under one end and put a coast at the tipped end for the turn. One of our table had a lip on it and didn't require us to make a wall with rulers or books. We'd grab all the ones that were in that race and roll em up to bounce off the books and around the coaster. First one down won. My brother and I used to get into some arguments over that game. lol

[Bill]

The first thing I ever played was Cadeco All Star Baseball. Some distant cousin played it with me once and I was hooked. Got my own version, drafted teams like 5000 times and played through games by myself. Eventually moved on to a few computer games. Probably the one I played the most was XOR NFL Challenge. I loved the X's and O's showing me each play. Also played the crap out of Tony LaRussa 1 and 2 and Super Tecmo Bowl.

My grandma had one of those buzzy vibration football games that took like 10 mins to setup one 5 second play.

[Apollos]

Electric football was a big one. But, more hours were likely wasted here.

[Leones]

Only sports games? (I've been wargaming since I was a teen. I've bought Squad Leader 3 times! This last copy is a keeper. So many great titles over the years. Wargaming is in a bit of a renaissance theses days. Best of all is they never get dated like software. )


Back to sports though, hmm... APBA Football was big when I was stationed in Hawaii. Used to love running the Seahawks and Bears against all comers. Had a pretty good running game generally and stout defenses. Lots of fun!


Later MLB Showdown (a card based game) was one of the best baseball games I've enjoyed.


Currently the only sports board game I won is Crash Tackle Rugby.



edit: fixed a typo

[Jason]

Strat-o-Matic: cards and dice. Played hundreds of games on at bat at a time and painstakingly hand recorded and compiled box scores and season statistics.