A playthrough of Tecmo's 1991 football game for the NES, Tecmo Super Bowl.

This video shows an entire season, playoffs, and the Super Bowl played as the San Francisco 49ers.

And in a lucky coincidence since today just happens to be Super Bowl LIV, at 5:18:48 I face the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl.

Tecmo Super Bowl is one of those rare games that was not only a massive success when it was released, but one that has continued to gain in popularity over the years since. What makes TSB even more unusual, though, it is part of a genre where games tend to be discarded and forgotten about within a year. How then does a lone NES football cart manage to stay relevant for nearly thirty years?

(Well, I mean besides not being related to Electronic Arts in any way.)

I'm not sure that there's a single reason for it, but TSB was a landmark game, and American nostalgia is huge on this one. It is based on the NFL's 1991 season schedule, and it was the first game to feature the licensed use of both NFL team and player names.

It's a fast-paced, arcade style game that was a blast with two players (as long as you both agreed that the Raiders were off-limits - Bo Jackson, damn!), and it introduced all sorts of things to the original Tecmo Bowl formula that gave it just enough depth to keep in interesting without overcomplicating it. Now included are things like the coin toss, fumbles, injuries, the tracking of individual player stats across games, player substitutions, and you can't forget those cutscenes, which have been amped up considerably since the original Tecmo Bowl!

Tecmo's cutscenes were always awesome - whether you were playing Ninja Gaiden, Bad News Baseball, or Tecmo Super Bowl, those colorful cartoon scenes were always good for stirring up some hype.

But the graphics overall were pretty amazing for the NES. Two full teams appear on the field at once without any slowdown, and the animation was pretty good for little stick-men characters. Why is everything so pink though?

And who could ever forget those voice samples? "Ready....Down... HUT, HUT, HUT, HUT!" Or if you were playing as Bo Jackson, you'd be hearing "TOUCHDOWN!" every ten seconds as you pulled off an 80+ point lead against the AI or a younger sibling.

Seriously, Bo Jackson made the game unreasonably fun. I mean, I get Jerry Rice to do a couple of fun zags on the field here, but Bo could run literal circles around a whole team. Just ask Peter Griffin.

But overall, Tecmo Super Bowl is a ridiculously great time, and I don't even like football.

One last side note: did you know that hardcore fans still regularly update the game each year? It's mindblowing to think that people love TSB enough that you can actually go and buy a physical "Tecmo Super Bowl 2020" NES cartridge. That's some crazy dedication right there.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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