When it comes to video game history lessons, I only go as far back as the original Nintendo. I’ve never played an older video game system, and I don’t plan to. To Nintendo’s credit, many of its games were so inventive that it made whatever came before it seem irrelevant, like they had no bearing on the NES itself.
So, as far as I’m concerned, the first two hockey games ever were Blades of Steel by Konami and Nintendo’s Ice Hockey, which both get plenty of nostalgia-induced love. Blades of Steel debuted as an arcade in October 1987, but wasn’t released on NES until December 1988, and Ice Hockey showed up in March 1988. They’re similar enough that it’s as if one was influenced by the other. They both have a side view, simple physics, fights, and goalies who move as you press up or down on the D-pad. Blades of Steel is the more realistic of the two, which is like saying Diet Pepsi is healthier than Pepsi. Neither game is realistic; neither drink is healthy. Ice Hockey is more cutesy, with its trademark fat, medium, and skinny players and four skaters per team instead of five.
The rest of the 8-bit era didn’t produce anything too memorable. Slap Shot on Sega Master System looks like a lesser ripoff of the aforementioned games, and Wayne Gretzky Hockey on NES looks like watching one of those nerdy robot wars from an airplane thousands of feet in the sky.
And so we’re onto the 16-bit days and the more powerful technology of the Sega Genesis. A familiar cartoony charm, side-view, and simple take on hockey came in 1991 with Sega’s Mario Lemieux Hockey, but it’s a lot less fun than the NES games that influenced it. For the first time (of many), striving for realism got in the way of playability. It’s supposed to feel more like you’re on ice, but instead makes controlling your players a headache.
Right around the same time is when Electronic Arts changed hockey gaming forever with the first NHL Hockey on Genesis. Just like EA’s John Madden Football on Genesis a year prior, NHL Hockey wisely uses a vertical view and miraculously depicts something vaguely like real-life physics. Players slide on the ice, they gain momentum, they bump into each other. The puck glides and flies and flutters.
Madden was remarkable for its time, but had lots of kinks to iron out and depth to add in. EA’s technology catered better to the simpler, less restrained sport of hockey. Players are injected with the habit of keeping themselves moving (an EA hallmark that nobody else seemed to get), helping make the action unpredictable and organic. The sport allowed game developers to put 10 skaters on the ice who looked exactly the same and had the same basic skills, and it still felt right. Basketball and football don’t have that luxury.
I can’t overstate the importance of those fake physics that EA seemingly invented. Not only did they breathe life into football and hockey (and later basketball and soccer), but you can’t find natural movement like that in any other game genre at the time either. Many later sports games struggled to create natural motion too, despite years of insight and superior technology. EA had the magic recipe.
Before this make-out session gets too hot, now is a good time to mention that all of EA’s games played 100 times better on Genesis than on the SNES. I guess my dorky older brother had it right when he insisted that we wanted a Genesis in 1992, not a Super Nintendo. Who knows where I’d be today if I was stuck playing inferior hockey games in the 90s?
The first NHL Hockey had trademark smooth action and easy controls, but scoring was way too easy. Next up was NHLPA Hockey ’93, which fixed up the scoring somewhat. NHL ’94 made more refinements and added one-timers (another first), and it’s basically the most celebrated sports game ever. Stop to think how amazing it is that they struck gold and made a timeless classic only three years into their hockey endeavors. Other companies failed annually for much longer than three friggin’ years.
NHL 95 is arguably just as good as 94, similar in spirit but polished up with new graphics and faster, more wide-open gameplay. NHL 96 is faster yet, tricky to control, and with tougher AI. Most people say it’s where the series started to go downhill. Conveniently, the Sega Saturn and PlayStation had just hit the market. EA finished out their 16-bit run with NHL 97 and NHL 98 (the last Genesis game ever). They’re also fast, loose, and missing that earlier magic.
Were there other hockey games around in these days? Yeah, but they hardly matter. I wonder how many people who bought those other hockey games already owned one of EA’s games. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that all the other hockey games may have actually sold less if it weren’t for EA, who helped popularize hockey for a bunch of American kids who didn’t grow up with it.
There was Wayne Gretzky and the NHLPA All-Stars, a limited but frantic side-scrolling game (a C+ by my grades), ESPN National Hockey Night (D-), Tecmo Super Hockey (D-), and NHL All-Star Hockey ’95 (D), a shameless and inferior EA copycat. There were two bad Brett Hull Hockey games, and the utterly terrible Hit the Ice, a goofy 2-on-2 game that’s as slow as a senior citizen. On SNES, there was NHL Stanley Cup, a nauseating experiment in faux 3D graphics, and Pro Sport Hockey and Street Hockey, which are both really bad.
And how the hell did I forget EA’s Mutant League Hockey? It came out between NHL 94 and 95, a dark, ghoulish hockey game just like their NHL series, with gimmicky obstacles on the ice and most unfortunately, sluggish controls. I played it once 20 years ago, and that was enough for me to resist paying $40 for it whenever I see it in the special glass case at a used video game store.
As we all know, the entire 32- and 64-bit era was a transition from 2D charm to 3D roughness, and the transition was particularly hard on sports games. From a reviewer perspective, it’s a fun era to look back on. It was the still Wild West of sports gaming, where many different publishers took their shot.
For the most part, publishers were overly ambitious, dragging weak gameplay into a 3D world and adding complicated new controls without much benefit. There isn’t a single hockey game in the era that I scored better than a B.
The best games of the time were the simple ones. In 1995, Sony’s NHL FaceOff combined 2D sprites with a 3D rink and stuck with basic controls and straightforward strategies. The result is perhaps the best hockey game on PS1. The poor Sega Saturn got its start with NHL All-Star Hockey, which was a mess.
The FaceOff series got much worse as it went along, and there were a handful of other awful games like NHL Powerplay ’96 and NHL Breakaway ’98 and NHL Blades of Steel ’99 that crumbled under slippery controls and poor hockey logic.
EA’s first entry, NHL 97, was also terrible, but things got a little bit better for NHL 98 through NHL 2001. EA’s games from this era certainly didn’t age well; they look choppy, they feel awkward to control, and the logic is way simpler than it seemed at the time. NHL Championship Hockey 2000 by Fox Interactive was an unexpectedly decent, realistic entry.
Those are just the so-called simulations. In 1995, Midway set to capitalize on their NBA Jam success in 2D with NHL Open Ice: 2-on-2 Challenge in arcades, ported to PS1 a year later. The game feels like it was made in a day, and yet it’s one of the most fun games of the era, simple as it gets, blazing fast, and high-scoring. Sometimes, the less you try, the less you screw up.
Even Midway couldn’t resist pushing the limits, releasing Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey on N64. People seem to love it, but I find it awkward and shallow and with badly tuned controls. Two more installments followed, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey ’98 and Olympic Hockey ’98, and all three have identical gameplay.
EA also took a woeful shot at 3-on-3 arcade hockey with NHL Rock the Rink, using their established hockey engine and bad (like nails-on-a-chalkboard bad) presentation.
The jump to PS2 and Xbox couldn’t come soon enough, with way better graphics and analog controllers becoming standard.
Hold up! Can’t forget the Dreamcast, which beat all other consoles to the 128-bit party before its quick demise. Sega opted not to let EA infiltrate the sports genre on Dreamcast but failed to capitalize with quality games. In case you aren’t sensing a theme, I’m pretty sure the execs at Sega/2K and EA wanted to murder each other by 2000, and we’re only talking hockey, not football, where EA actually went to friggin’ court to shut out 2K.
Anyway, NHL 2K and NHL 2K2 were impressive visually but had frustratingly messed up gameplay. Okay, now we can forget about the Dreamcast.
Again, Sony started off a generation okay with NHL FaceOff 2001, a pretty simple and smooth game. It’s the only season when Sony had the best hockey game on the market. Unfortunately, they got worse as the years went on (again!) and eventually gave up … three different times! That’s right, they no-showed 2002 and took a year off in 2004 and rebranded to the Gretzky name, which lasted two games before they quit for good.
Xbox’s proprietary offering NHL Rivals 2004 fell way flat and was one and done.
EA’s first three tries on the next gen weren’t great. They looked promising and had some depth, but didn’t play smoothly. We’ll come back to EA in a minute.
2K soldiered on without their exclusive Dreamcast sandbox, and their games got better little by little. And I do mean little by little. For example, the action was more frantic, the AI was smarter, the control was a little better, but they could never make passing feel natural. Every pass was the same speed, which just drove me nuts. If you do want to try a 2K game, make it NHL 2K6, which earned a B+ on this fine website.
Let’s back up a few years, as Midway again reinvented their arcade engine for NHL Hitz 2002. It’s 3-on-3 with well-tuned controls, a heavy-but-not-too-heavy dose of hitting, and some creative gimmicks. The next year, they made solid refinements and NHL Hitz 2003 is a must-own game that doesn’t get the credit it deserves, an easy A+ in my book. That wasn’t good enough apparently, and they switched to 5-on-5 action for NHL Hitz Pro, which I like, but isn’t nearly as good. A fixed-up sequel could have been great, but Midway gave up on hockey, and eventually gave up altogether. Their last game, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, came out in 2008. I don’t know a thing about the business of video games, but Midway sure put out some awesome sports games, bless their hearts. (And how funny that Mortal Kombat made it into an article about hockey games?)
It’s time for a bigger nugget of truth, as once again EA changed hockey gaming forever. NHL 2004 introduced the “skill stick,” letting you use the right thumbstick to move the hockey stick, deking and protecting the puck. Anyone who’s played hockey in real life would attest that how you move your stick is pretty important. (I’m really resisting sexual innuendo here.)
EA had also integrated similar controls in other sports by this time. In NBA Live 2003, you used the analog stick for dribbling moves, and in Madden 2003, you pressed shoulder buttons to move the ball to the player’s other hand. The rest of NHL 2004 was an improvement as well. Skating was much smoother, and smarter AI led to more realistic passing. It was a big step toward the simulation end of the spectrum.
NHL 2005 and NHL 06 stepped back a bit toward an up-tempo style that was less reliant on swift deking. In the early iteration of the skill stick, you pushed a face button to shoot, which meant you had to take your thumb off the stick. It was a bit tricky, and EA had new tricks up their sleeves coming on the next generation. We’ll get to that in a second.
For NHL 07 on PS2 and Xbox, EA seemed to experiment with a whole different scheme, where the stick does the passing, and the shoulders do the shooting. This weird control scheme combined with more improvements in gameplay resulted in a uniquely fun game that’s often overlooked. Players seemed more human-like in their movement and AI, although the game still feels up-tempo. (By the way, if indeed they were experimenting, kudos to them. That’s a hell of a way to deal with those overlapping years when everyone focuses on the newer generation.)
On the next generation, starting with NHL 07 on Xbox 360 and NHL 08 on PS3, the skill stick was revamped to control shots and body checks. You didn’t just deke with it, you flicked it quickly to unleash a shot. With passes and poke checks on the shoulder buttons, your right thumb was free to operate the stick at all times. This brilliant scheme sure felt strange when it was new, but it became amazingly natural, and it’s the system they’ve stuck with for over 10 years now.
Each subsequent version made minor gameplay improvements that continued pushing toward a simulation. Players interacted and collided much more naturally. You couldn’t just knock a guy off his feet from any angle. Poke checks became a bigger part of the game. There weren’t easy goal-scoring methods that would work every time.
Arcade-style hockey had fallen by the wayside by this point, except for one cute entry by EA in 2009, 3 on 3 NHL Arcade. It was a download-only game that’s no longer available due to licensing. It uses skill stick controls as well, which seems odd for its goofy style. It’s quick fun with limited options, and it was blasted by reviewers for being too shallow.
Let’s touch on 2K for a second. It’ll only take a second. They pretty much botched their last run. Instead of building year-to-year improvements, they made extreme changes, seemingly unsure what style of game they were going for, and ultimately ended with a thud. They gave up after NHL 2K10, then had to release a 2K11 version on Wii just to satisfy a contract. For a franchise that had been around 11 years, more if you count the Sega-published games that didn’t have the 2K name, it’s pretty sad to see your final breath breathed on the stupid Wii.
I’ve got bad news and good news. The bad news is that the story gets less interesting from here. The good news is that this article is almost over.
EA had the 2012 season uncontested, and their victory lap was sweet. NHL 12 is an A+ game, deep, smooth, and exciting, with perfectly balanced game logic. Those years of slight tweaking had paid off. Sure, EA tried to market the hell out of bigger changes (“It’s a more realistic skating engine!” “Check out the new fighting engine!” “The enforcer engine, everybody!”), but there were lots of tiny improvements that really made the difference. The last on PS3/Xbox 360, NHL Legacy Edition, is another A+. When played on its hardcore simulation setting, it’s as realistic a game of hockey as I would ever want.
They just kept on rolling, moving into the PS4/Xbox One generation for NHL 15. Today, they have no competition. EA are atop the mountain in simulation video game hockey, and nobody is trying to top them.
The only other recent hockey games have tried to capitalize on the fond memories of the past. Super Blood Hockey debuted on Windows in 2017, later as a download game on PS4 and Xbox One. It looks a lot like Ice Hockey from 1988, but it’s sped up and infused with over-the-top cartoon gore.
There’s also Bush Hockey League from 2017, another download game. I remember watching marketing videos before its release, clearly pitching the game as a throwback to NHL ‘94 with a 70s minor league theme. There were fights and even that digital star under the player with the puck, just like in the old days. It seemed promising. Then it came out, and we all got to see what a sluggish, out-of-whack piece of junk it was. Just not even close.
Bush Hockey League reinforced what I told you many paragraphs ago. The early EA games were great in a way that other publishers just didn’t know how to match. People like to hate on EA these days for their NFL license monopoly, seemingly lazy year-to-year releases, and absurd microtransaction-based game modes. But, like every business, they were small at one time. They invented the model of releasing a new game each year, and they made the most of it, trudging through the lousy years to push toward better gameplay. EA Sports earned hockey dominance the old fashioned way, on the ice.
Published February 20, 2020
Updated July 23, 2023