Great Football

Great Football is another installment in the Great sports series that Sega released for the Master System and its Japanese predecessor, the Mark III, at a time when the console was trying to cover as broad a range of sports genres as possible for as varied an international audience as possible across different markets. The game simulates an American football match, where the player alternately directs their team's offensive plays and defensive formations, trying through successive drives to move the ball as close as possible to the opponent's goal line and eventually score the coveted touchdown plus extra points for a successful attempt.

The controls stay simple and focus on basic gameplay situations — choosing a play from a brief menu, running with the ball between defenders, and short passes to teammates, without the complex playbook or detailed formations players would know from much later sports series focused on American football and its elaborate tactics. The graphical treatment of the field from a bird's-eye view matches the standards of the time, and the game again offers the popular two-player duel, a usual and highly valued element of fun in Great sports titles for long evenings. Whistle and player-collision sound effects round out the match atmosphere, though the musical accompaniment remains minimalist and rather fragmentary, as was usual for sports titles of this generation.

Today Great Football serves more as a historical exhibit than as a game players would boot up for fun in itself or for the depth of the sports simulation as such. Still, it demonstrates how, already in the mid-1980s, Sega was trying to establish the sports genre on its consoles, even for a sport that didn't have as strong a tradition and fan base in Japan or Europe as it did in North America, where American football originates and from where it gradually spread to the rest of the world and onto home console screens.

Why play it: For those interested in the history of sports games on Sega consoles, who'll appreciate a look at how Sega, already in the mid-1980s, was trying to establish even sports without a strong tradition outside North America.