Brett Hull Hockey '95

Motion capture in 1995. On a DOS machine. That detail alone probably sold more copies than any magazine ad could — because if you were a teenager reading about it in a gaming mag, it sounded like witchcraft. Real athletes, real movement, digitized and stuffed into a hockey game. The future had arrived, and it smelled like cigarette smoke and a CRT monitor running at 640x480.

Brett Hull Hockey '95 is Accolade's entry into the NHL simulation market, built around the name of one of the era's most recognizable goal scorers. Hull was a legitimate star — a sniper with a shot that made goalies reconsider their career choices — and Accolade knew exactly what they were buying with that licensing deal. A face on the box, a name that meant something to anyone who watched hockey in the early nineties. The game covers NHL teams and attempts a reasonably full simulation of ice hockey, the kind that was competing directly with EA's NHL series, which by '95 had already established itself as the genre standard.

And there's the problem. EA's NHL games had a feel — responsive, fluid, arcade-enough to be fun but with enough tactical depth to keep you thinking. Brett Hull Hockey '95 has the motion-captured animations, yes, and they do look more naturalistic than you'd expect for the year. But looking natural and playing naturally are different things. The controls have a certain stiffness to them, a half-second delay between intention and action that makes the on-ice movement feel like you're steering a shopping cart on a slight incline. Passing works, shooting works, but the whole thing never quite clicks into that rhythm where you stop thinking about the interface and just play hockey.

What the game does deserve credit for is ambition. Accolade wasn't a small outfit, but they were punching at EA's weight class with this one, and the motion capture was a genuine technical achievement worth acknowledging. The skaters move with a fluency that the competition's sprite work couldn't always match. Crowd noise, the rink atmosphere, the general presentation — it's all competent. The problem is that competent in 1995 meant you were measuring yourself against NHL '95, and that was a high bar.

Today, Brett Hull Hockey '95 is mostly a historical curiosity — a data point in the story of how the sports game market shook out in the mid-nineties, and a reminder that marketing a game on a single technological feature rarely survives contact with the competition. If you grew up with it, there's a familiar warmth to booting it up in DOSBox. If you didn't, it's an interesting half-hour to see what motion capture looked like before anyone had figured out what to actually do with it. Just don't expect it to replace whatever you're running on modern hardware.