4th & Inches

Year 1988, winter outside, dad just brought home a box with a floppy disk and there are guys in helmets on the cover. American football. I had no idea what it was, but I fired it up and spent the whole weekend on it.

4th & Inches is a computer sports game from 1988 for MS-DOS that simulates American football. The name refers to a situation where the attacking team has one attempt left and needs to gain the last few yards to a first down — the toughest, most thrilling moment in the entire sport. This game revolves around tactical decision-making on the field.

You play from a bird's eye view, looking down at the action across the entire field. You select an offensive or defensive formation from a list, confirm it, and then the actual gameplay begins — a mix of direct control and tactics. The graphics match the era: colorful but flat figures on a green rectangle, no illusions about realism. The controls are snappy for what PC could do back then, and the game doesn't require you to know American football by heart — but understanding a few basic rules helps a lot, otherwise you'll just be mashing buttons and wondering why you keep losing.

What this game brought was mainly that it took American football seriously as a tactical matter. It wasn't an arcade shooter with a ball. Play selection before every snap, reading the defense, choosing the right moment — it was all there. In 1988 on PC, that was unusual. How has it aged? Honestly, the graphics and sound are relics now — PC speaker beeping and jerky animations won't impress anyone. And if you didn't grow up with American football, some of the magic will be lost on you, because the game doesn't explain the rules. Back then you either read the manual or called a friend.

Today it's worth playing mainly in two cases: either you're interested in the history of sports games on PC and want to see where the genre comes from, or you love that specific simplicity of early eighties simulations, where all the depth hides behind a minimalist interface. You can run it in your browser via DOSBox with no installation, and forty minutes will fly by. Don't expect more from it — but don't do it an injustice either. For its time, it was solid software.