The PSReport Card
The four games that led to Madden Madness

These are the days when teenagers would rather simulate football games on Playstation2 than actually watch them play out at Heinz Field. Think of that what you will, but considering that sports video games are the younger generation's new National Passion, PSR decided to take a look at the four games that led to the Madden Madness that exists today:

'Pong'

The game that brought video to the masses in the 1970s, 'Pong' took table tennis and made it cool - in so much as making table tennis cool is possible. Take away the non-existent graphics - think a square that served as a ball and two bars that were the paddles - and the appeal lay in the competition: You against the computer or your best friend. Primitive, yes, but the ground work for a revolution was in place.

'Baseball Stars'

Sports gaming wasn't all that great through the early years of the Nintendo Entertainment System - then came 'Baseball Stars,' which grows more impressive with each passing year. The graphics were cartoony at best, but that wasn't the point. This game was all about the first 'career mode,' specifically the early template for wannabe GMs. In 'Baseball Stars,' you could for the first time buy and sell players for a team you created to compete in-season against the likes of The Lovely Ladies (oh, those pink pants), The Ninja Black Sox (beware some guy named 'Joe') and, of course, The American Dreams (with a lineup that included another 'Joe,' a 'Hank' and a 'Lefty' - but no 'Roberto,' sniff).

'NHL '91'

Electronic Arts Sports turned things up a notch when it created this game for the Sega 16-bit system. Unseemly graphic detail in the form of end-to-end rushes that went up and down and fights that left losers bloody were selling points, but nothing beat the little things. Every NHL organization was represented, and each club has four lines that users could rotate at their choosing. Plus, during the Stanley Cup playoffs, scoring records were kept by the computer, meaning you could chart just how many points that No. 66 was piling up. EA Sports would take these 'minor' details and make big things out of them for future versions of 'NHL' - and then it decided to soup-up 'Madden' with what was working so well on the simulated ice. After that, nothing was the same again.

'Joe Montana Talking Football'

Sega gets a second shout, only this time for a game it actually created. 'Talking Football' came out in the early 1990s and was neither smooth nor particularly fun, but it did have a play-by-play announcer (albeit one who was usually at least three plays behind). Though a good three years would pass before any game-maker created game-calling feature that wasn't annoying (props to EA Sports again, with 'Madden '94'), 'Talking Football' lit the spark that talking games could work. Today, it's hard to imagine when they didn't.