Παιχνίδια χόκεϊ επί πάγου των 80s και των 90s

Hockey games in the 80s and 90s pulled in three directions at once. Arcade titles treated the rink as a fighting stage with a puck in it, licensed match games chased real teams and real rosters, and management titles removed the skating entirely and left you with a season, a payroll and a schedule. All three are in this collection, spread across DOS, the Sega Genesis, the SNES and the NES.

The reference point is EA's NHL series. NHL Hockey arrived on the Genesis in 1991 with league team licensing but no players' association deal, so the rosters were not the real ones. NHLPA Hockey '93 solved that from the opposite end: real players, but without the full NHL team identity. NHL '94 finally had both, added the one-timer, dropped fighting from the series, and moved at a speed the sequels never quite reproduced — which is why it is still the version most people mean when they talk about the series. NHL 95 through NHL 98 kept expanding the simulation layer without displacing it.

The PC took a slower, more tactical route. Bethesda Softworks released Wayne Gretzky Hockey in the late 80s and built it around line changes, coaching decisions and a camera that followed the play rather than the arcade close-up, then developed the idea through two sequels. Alongside it sit games that skip the ice altogether: Hockey League Simulator and Hockey Manager '97 run the season as numbers, and your input is trades, lines and tactics rather than passes.

The console side kept the sport looser. Konami's Blades of Steel started in arcades and became a NES fixture, cutting to a one-on-one fistfight whenever tempers broke. Nintendo's Ice Hockey let you build a team from three player body types, trading speed against strength before the puck dropped. Mario Lemieux Hockey brought the same directness to the Genesis, and Mutant League Hockey took EA's own engine and filled the rink with monsters, mines and holes in the ice — a parody that plays like a sharpened version of the game it borrowed from.

Titles marked as playable start straight in the browser through an emulator, with no installation and no registration. Most of the match games support two players sharing one keyboard or two gamepads, which is how they were designed to be played.