In 1978, Atari's Football for the 2600 employed three-man teams consisting of players who looked like washing machines and a field that filled a single screen. Gameplay was generally very crude, even by the lowered standards of the time. Of course, reality didn't quite match expectations. The idea that those little black boxes would be able to drag Sunday afternoon and Monday evening through the rest of the week was a huge selling point for the console systems. So when the Atari 2600/Video Computer System (VCS) and Mattel's Intellivision brought video games to our living rooms in 19, respectively, there was really only one sport that people wanted to play on them. Thanks to the efforts of commissioner Pete Rozelle and innovations like ABC TV executive Roone Arledge's Monday Night Football, the NFL was enjoying an unprecedented explosion in public support. Part of this was due to the way that the National Football League surged in popularity at the same time as the video game era dawned. Even baseball, the national pastime for nearly a century and an apparent natural to be reenacted on a TV screen or computer monitor, lacked the prestige of its younger brother. No other sport was given the attention granted to the gridiron game. Ever since the console and computer games industries got off the ground in the later 1970s, developers have been trying to build a better football title.
The story of sports gaming is the story of football gaming.