The Legend of ‘Tecmo Super Bowl’ (2024)

Christian Okoye could see pixels dancing in his eyes. It was a look the retired Chiefs running back had seen before, one he’d become accustomed to encountering. "Man," the approaching fan said, "you were a monster in Tecmo Super Bowl."

That brief exchange, which happened this October at Arrowhead Stadium, is far from unique. Okoye, 55, has met hundreds of similarly euphoric devotees of the old Nintendo game. The 6-foot-1, 253-pound force scored 40 touchdowns and made two Pro Bowls over six seasons with Kansas City — but the Nigerian Nightmare’s legend lives on due to his digital avatar’s freakish ability to shed tackles in a digital world.

Released 25 years ago next month, Tecmo Super Bowl provided the ultimate in sports geek wish fulfillment. Using only two buttons and a directional pad, children of the late 1980s and early 1990s could turn their favorite players into whirling superhumans. Though the 8-bit classic featured all 28 NFL teams (this was 1991), expansive rosters, and a detailed playbook, TSB’s not-so-realistic quirks made it the best sports game of all time.

You could kill off an entire quarter with a single Barry Sanders touchdown run, launch a 100-yard pass with Dan Marino, and send Bruce Smith out to maul blockers en route to crushing a ball carrier halfway across the field. The game never aspired to true-to-life simulation, but it was as addictive as Tetris. As former 49ers running back and Tecmo weapon Roger Craig put it, "That sh*t was fun."

So fun that people still play it. A lot of people. While the Madden series is updated annually, the original Tecmo Super Bowl persists. In fact, TSB has been part of two national ad campaigns this year alone. And on the way to becoming a touchstone, the game has helped mythologize a generation of athletes.

John Offerdahl, a five-time Pro Bowl linebacker for the Dolphins during the Tecmo era, is often taken aback by the compliments he hears from deeply nostalgic TSB aficionados. "It cracks me up," he said. "They have a little bit higher opinion of me than they probably should."

Okoye says he gets dozens of emails about Tecmo every month. His Facebook page and Twitter feed routinely light up with references to the game. Okoye has lost count of the number of worn-out gray plastic Tecmo Super Bowl cartridges that he’s been asked to autograph. It’s in the thousands.

I discovered Tecmo Super Bowl in early 1992, soon after my cousin Andrew snagged a copy as a gift. On weekend afternoons, we’d sit 6 inches from a wood console Sony television and play repeatedly for hours at a time. (But never as our hometown team — the Steve Grogan–quarterbacked Patriots weren’t exactly a sexy option.)

The game was both simple enough for elementary schoolers like us and complex enough for football diehards obsessed with X’s and O’s. On one hand, each period lasted just five minutes, penalties didn’t exist, and key plays sometimes triggered animated scenes. On the other, there was a season mode, substitutions, and a 64-play offensive playbook.

Even as a growing number of sports titles became available for the then-newfangled Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, nothing could compete with TSB. In December 1991, Electronic Gaming Monthly gushed, "a game with graphics and play so good it beats most of its 16-bit competition."

To its makers, TSB was a high point. After Japanese company Tecmo had a hit with arcade (1987) and Nintendo (1989) versions of Tecmo Bowl, it planned a follow-up. The popular NES edition of Tecmo Bowl included a limited playbook and the names of actual players, but it had only 12 teams and lacked an NFL license. The sequel was designed to be a faster, supersized take on the original.

The two men most responsible for TSB’s distinctive feel were director Shinichiro Tomie and programmer Akihiko Shimoji. Last winter, longtime Tecmo Super Bowl fanatic Lou Raguse, now a TV reporter at KARE 11 in Minnesota, tracked them down. When the two started on the project, neither was a big football fan. Remarkably, Raguse reported, they learned about America’s most popular spectator sport by reading the Japanese magazine Touchdown Pro and watching NFL action recorded off satellite TV.

"Because I wanted to use the unique formations and strategies," Tomie said in an interview with Raguse, "I often watched the videos in slow motion while rewinding them and jotting down the players’ movements on paper."

And thus was born Tecmo Super Bowl’s extensive playbook, which offered everything from standard dives to flea-flickers. (Each team’s basic offense was customizable.) The number of star-studded clubs with which you could pile up points made it difficult to choose just one. TSB project manager Hidehisa Yamaguchi, who also worked as a programmer on Tecmo Bowl, said via email that the best all-around squad was a certain perennial Super Bowl runner-up. Don Beebe, a speedy receiver on those loaded Bills teams of the ’90s, told me that when his brothers squared off in Tecmo Super Bowl, they bickered over who’d get to pick Buffalo.

Though it was the first video game to showcase real NFL stars and real teams, Tecmo Super Bowl remained true to its predecessor’s ethos. "We did not aim for reality," Yamaguchi said. "Instead, we emphasized both the sense of speed and strength demonstrated by NFL players."

That approach led to the creation of a cast of mini superheroes, each of whom had his own heightened set of attributes. In 8-bit form, Joe Montana, John Elway, Barry Sanders, Lawrence Taylor, and Reggie White were unstoppable forces with extraordinary powers. (I’d add Randall Cunningham, Jim Kelly, and Bernie Kosar to that list, but their names didn’t appear due to licensing issues. In TSB, they’re known only as QB Eagles, QB Bills, and QB Browns.)

Okoye was another superstar — his "hitting power" made him into a human battering ram. "I really liked that he could make his opponents fly away whenever he was just touched by players of rival teams," Yamaguchi said. But as invincible as he was, Okoye conceded that the Tecmo crown belongs to someone else.

Nobody is more closely associated with Tecmo Super Bowl than Bo Jackson. The real-life two-sport star was a marvel. Tecmo Bo was a legend. "I think the only player who’s better than me is Bo Jackson," Okoye said. In the game, the Raiders running back is unstoppable. While developing the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary You Don’t Know Bo, director Michael Bonfiglio kept hearing the same refrain. "Every time I mentioned Bo to somebody they would always say, ‘Tecmo Bowl!’" said Bonfiglio, who slipped footage of Tecmo Bo into the 2012 film. "It was always the first thing that anybody said."

Jackson’s Tecmo Super Bowl dominance isn’t just part of his own lore. Without the electric presence of Tecmo Bo, the game might’ve ended up buried in a box in America’s dusty attic.

The Fox animated series Family Guy, which doubles as a loosely curated museum of pop culture references, even recently paid homage to the game. An episode that aired in May showed a Nintendo-playing Peter Griffin running wild as Tecmo Bo.

This spring, two Southern California admen saw that scene and felt validated. Senior art director Sheldon Melvin and senior copywriter Matt Kappler of the agency David&Goliath had always figured that guys in their 30s and 40s would love a Tecmo-themed commercial. The game popping up in Family Guy pushed them to act on their instinct. It was settled: Kia’s 2016 fall campaign, set to launch at the beginning of the NFL season, would star Tecmo Bo. "What is comparable to the car?" Melvin said. The answer was 8-bit Bo Jackson, who, as Melvin pointed out, had "agility, speed, and power." The real Jackson was hired for a pair of spots, in which Bo climbs into a Kia Sorento and drives into a 3-D version of the realm that he once ruled. (Bo victim Brian Bosworth costars in one of the ads.)

Because they loved the game and also feared backlash from fans, Melvin and Kappler took great care to ensure that the commercials stayed faithful to the experience of Tecmo. The visual effects wizzes at Method Studios reverently re-created that pixelated world; the crowd, music, animations, cheerleaders, and fonts were identical to what you see when you play TSB. (The stadium signage reads "Tecmo Bowl" not "Tecmo Super Bowl" because Tecmo no longer has an NFL license.) Even Bo’s flat black jersey was just like the one worn by his tiny sprite.

"We wanted to make sure we were treating the game with the proper amount of respect," Kappler said. "If the details are right, that’s when you can fold your message in."

To Kia’s director of marketing communications, Kimberley Gardiner, the power of Tecmo Bo crystallized over the summer when the carmaker’s dealers first screened the ads. They were smitten instantly. Gardiner said that the appeal was pretty simple: "Everybody wants to be Bo Jackson."

Kia wasn’t the only major corporation to recently tap Tecmo Bo. In Bud Light’s NFL season-opening commercial, there’s a quick shot of Jackson playing as himself in Tecmo Super Bowl. After a moment, he looks at the camera and says, "You can’t catch me."

In reality, Tecmo Bo is only partially to thank for TSB’s ubiquity. There’s a dedicated community of Tecmo Super Bowl enthusiasts making sure that the game — and all of its stars — will always be remembered. For the last decade, the planet’s best Tecmo Super Bowl players have gathered annually at Tecmo Madison. The tournament, held at a few different bars in Wisconsin’s capital, draws hundreds of participants.

In 2012, NFL Films made a short documentary about the competition. The half-hour special also included both current NFL players waxing poetic about Tecmo Super Bowl and a scene with Okoye playing Tecmo. The short documentary was nominated for a Sports Emmy. It lost, but producer Greg Frith didn’t mind. "Just the fact that a bunch of dopes playing video games got the nomination was fantastic," he said. For the last few years, Frith has been trying to sell the idea of a reality series about Tecmo Super Bowl players.

No network has bitten yet, but these days it’s not like TSB lacks pop culture presence. There are Tecmo blogs. People sell bootleg Tecmo merchandise. You can buy hacked Tecmo cartridges containing current NFL rosters. Tecmo-style football even seemingly made its way from the 8-bit stadium into a real one.

During the second quarter of a Giants-Eagles game in October 2013, then-Philly.com writer Jimmy Kempski noticed that Philadelphia had broken out a familiar-looking formation. Facing a second-and-10 at New York’s 15-yard line, Michael Vick lined up in shotgun with three receivers spread out to his left. The moment Jason Kelce snapped the ball, the center and guard Todd Herremans pulled to the right, opening a huge hole for the quarterback, who bolted all the way down to the 1.

After watching it again, Kempski realized that the play was nearly identical to one found in Tecmo Super Bowl. In the video game version, it’s designed for the lightning-fast QB Eagles. Kempski was elated. "I was jumping up and down," he said. "I just knew immediately that it was gold."

The next day he wrote a blog post laying out the similarities between the two plays. A long list of sports sites jumped on Kempski’s find. Now with PhillyVoice, the reporter wishes he’d asked then-Eagles coach Chip Kelly if he’d really taken the play from Tecmo. In October, a 49ers spokesman said that the cagey Kelly wasn’t available to discuss the matter. I did get ahold of Julian Vandervelde, an offensive lineman who played 14 games for the 2013 Eagles.

"There is a 0 percent chance Chip stole a play from Tecmo Super Bowl," Vandervelde said in an email. Then he added this: "Mike [Vick] is just such a freak that if he’d been in that game it would be considered Bo Jackson–level unfair to use him."

Just as Bo Jackson elevated the status of Tecmo Super Bowl, it did the same for several of the game’s slightly less Bunyanesque players. Consider the case of former Buccaneers cornerback Wayne Haddix. He still hears the same question about his skill in TSB. "Why," people often ask, "are you so good?" Haddix is happy to explain that in 1990, he returned three of his seven interceptions for touchdowns and made the Pro Bowl. Now a financial adviser, Haddix said that Tecmo has helped him connect with clients curious about his past life.

For ex-players who don’t appear in national commercials, the existence of Tecmo is an ego boost. David Fulcher, once a Pro Bowl safety for the Bengals and now a coach and administrator at Cincinnati Christian University, enjoys checking in with his exaggerated alter ego. "That ain’t David Fulcher," he said with a laugh. "That Tecmo guy was too fast."

Former Browns running back/return man Eric Metcalf is proud of his place in Tecmo. "I was a beast on that game," he said. The problem is that he has nobody to brag to. His son, he said, has "never seen it and he still doesn’t know what I’m talking about."

By now, Tecmo Super Bowl and its stars are inextricable. The players, particularly the ones who’ve mostly avoided the limelight since retiring from the NFL, have long since come to this realization. "You basically become a legend," said former Giants linebacker Carl Banks.

At a recent speaking engagement in Wisconsin, a fan walked up to Don Beebe and blurted out: "You were the bomb in Tecmo." Beebe said he’s heard similar compliments "a few hundred times."

These days, John Offerdahl knows when fans want to talk Tecmo. He sees it in their facial expressions. "I can almost tell they played the game before they even mention it," Offerdahl said. "They usually get really shocked and excited."

Roger Craig was once standing on the sideline of an NFL game when a man approached and said that he had a friend who’d like to speak to him on the phone. On the line was Snoop Dogg, who said, "You were my favorite player on Tecmo."

"Long live Tecmo," said former Rams quarterback Jim Everett, who, when he wasn’t playing the game as himself, liked picking Dan Marino and the Dolphins.

Following Tecmo Super Bowl, its eponymous parent company (now Koei Tecmo) rolled out updated editions for various consoles and handheld systems. None were as good or influential as the original. As childish as clinging to a 25-year-old video game may be, the continued obsession with TSB has helped preserve the careers of dozens of athletes in 8-bit amber.

For Okoye, the constant recognition is a little strange, but he isn’t bothered by all the attention Tecmo Super Bowl has brought him. "It’s better to be remembered," he said, "than not to be remembered."

Alan Siegel is a writer in Washington, D.C. Email him at asiegel05@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @AlanSiegelDC.