RealSports Football

RealSports Football is an American-football-inspired sports game from Atari that, on the 8-bit 800/XL computers, offers a simplified yet fairly elaborate simulation of an NFL match for its time. The player builds a game plan, chooses types of offensive and defensive plays, and controls individual players while running with the ball, passing, or blocking the opponent, with the game respecting the basic rules of American football, including the down system and the yards needed to reach the next marker on the field. Picking the right combination of offensive formation against the opponent's defensive setup is one of the things that gives the matches tactical depth despite the overall simplicity of the controls.

The visual presentation uses a top-down view of the field, typical of sports games of the era, with clearly distinguished teams and readable animation of player movement across the whole playing area. On the 8-bit Atari the game runs smoothly even with a larger number of characters on screen at once, which was a noticeable improvement compared to the console versions on the 2600, thanks to the more powerful hardware of home computers. The controls are adapted for the joystick, and despite the simplifications compared to real American football, the game offers enough tactical options to keep two-player matches unpredictable and entertaining throughout.

At the time of release, RealSports Football was among the titles that helped establish Atari as a maker not only of arcade games but also of sports-oriented titles for home computers, expanding the lineup with a discipline that was immensely popular in the US. Today the game is interesting mainly as evidence of an early attempt to bring the complexity of American football into an accessible form controllable with a single joystick, even though it logically cannot match the depth of the sports simulations of the nineties. Even so, the game retained a reputation as one of the more thorough sports games available on the Atari 800/XL, mainly thanks to combining tactical game-plan selection with direct control of individual players on the field.

Why play it: For anyone interested in the history of sports simulations, it is a thoroughly crafted attempt to bring the complexity of American football onto a single joystick, even though it doesn't rival the depth of nineties titles.