People Play Games #1 - John Elway's Quarterback

Hello, and welcome to the first installment of a new column on the Musicarium, “People Play Games”. This column will be the spiritual sister to the seldom-seen “Nintend’oh!” column written by Dan Baxter. For “People Play Games”, each column will focus on a specific sub-genre of older games (re: 1996 or earlier), such as games based on Arnold Schwarzenegger films, games with over-the-top commercial tie-ins, and so on. Together, we’ll look back fondly on the dog shit we spent our youth wasting our time on.


For the first column, I wanted to discuss a genre of games pretty much non-existent today: sports games with pro athlete sponsorship. Nowadays, nearly all sports games are put out by Electronic Arts or 2K Sports, and their games are usually quite good. But it wasn’t always this way. Before the Madden NFL series popularized sports video games and put EA on the map, all sorts of different developers and publishers were putting out awful sports games for the Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. These games were easily spotted by their borderline unplayability, lack of official team and player names, and the emblazoned name of whatever dopey athlete signed on to be the spokesman. Today’s entry, John Elway’s Quarterback (NES, 1988), is the standard-bearer for poorly designed and developed games put out to cash in on a hot athlete’s name before people knew any better.

And man, is John Elway’s Quarterback an astoundingly horrible video game. We of course start with the signature feature of any game like this; city names only, no logos. Because playing with “Player 1” on “San Francisco” is much more fun that playing as Joe Montana! Even John Elway isn’t in the game, and he’s on the fucking cover. When you see a team select screen that looks like this, you know you’re in trouble.

The gameplay, you ask? Why, it’s putrid! Offense consists of either quarterback draws that are immediately stuffed for no gain, or throws that either go four feet to the left or right (directly into the turf, of course) or are intercepted. I managed to make it through one-half of John Elway’s Quarterback and I completed one pass, a screen to a running back standing immediately to my right. Here you see a typical Quarterback “scrum”, with the ball loose on the ground to the left of the quarterback (it’s the orange dot).

Offensive play calling is only slightly sub-Madden NFL 10. Plays are listed simply enough, with names like “post”, “screen”, and “sneak”. But every play that didn’t start out of the shotgun resulted in the quarterback snapping the ball and automatically lunging for a first down without my pressing a button. Eventually, I attempted to give up on offense, and after surrendering a touchdown, ran the return back into the end zone to accept a safety. Of course, John Elway’s Quarterback didn’t even allow me to quit the game in a fun manner, actually awarding me the ball and putting me at the 20-yard line as if it was a touchback. It’s one thing to not fully convey the complexities of football in a video game; it’s quite another to get the rules completely wrong. Eventually, I succeeded in surrendering a safety. See?

The defensive end was not much better. Three times I intercepted the other team without pressing a button or knowing what was going on. Defense is basically chasing after the quarterback as he takes a 35-step drop away from the line of scrimmage. From there, either you sack him or he connects on a bomb for a touchdown. There’s no in-between. Once, the opposing quarterback was facing 4th and inches from his own 15-yard line, and elected to drop back into his own end zone and unleash a sixty yard pass that resulted in a touchdown. Something tells me that the creators of this game (most likely Japanese men) have never watched a football game in their lives.

There are a slew of games that are just as bad that feature equally hilarious professional athlete spokesmen (Bo Jackson, Deion Sanders, Emmitt Smith, Troy Aikman, Roger Clemens, George Foreman, etc.), which leads me to wonder: did they ever actually play these games? I’d like to imagine John Elway sitting in the game company’s offices, slapping his knee with a big smile on his face while playing his game, while yes-men talk about how “lifelike” and “realistic” the game is and John nods in approval. In fact, the reaction of the athlete playing the awful game bearing his likeness would be 100 times more entertaining than the games themselves.

John Lacey