Joe Montana Football

I remember constantly checking the manual while playing Joe Montana Football. It was back in 1990, when football on computers meant mostly tables, numbers, and a lot of mouse clicking. Sega had more action-oriented graphics on consoles, but on PC we "played" football more like some financial simulation with padded reality.

This is American football — and not the simple affair you know from arcade games. Here you play tactically. You select offensive formations, read the defense, think about where to send the pass. The players on the field move according to the strategy you've set. The graphics are pixelated, the sound minimal, you almost switch between modes of "I'm waiting for this" and "I'm watching it, but somehow it doesn't interest me".

The controls aren't terrible, but they're not natural either. The selection of formations is decent, there are various difficulty levels, tournaments, and seasons. But when you enjoy planning more than the actual football in action, you know the game isn't quite ideal. The animations of runs and passes are stiff. The worst part is the waiting — the game doesn't have a speed-up feature, sometimes you just stand and wait to see what happens. Personally, I enjoyed it more as a puzzle than as entertainment.

Joe Montana Football was the first attempt to bring more complex football to the PC. It wasn't a hit on the level of the later Madden games, but it had seriousness and solid structure. In the nineties you'd get it if football really interested you and you were aware that visually and action-wise it wasn't anything spectacular. It was more of a thinking game than an experience.

Today it's mainly an archival curiosity for collectors and people who want to try out how they solved football when there was no OpenGL and 3D acceleration. It's nothing that would blow you away, but when you play it in DOSBox, you'll understand why those old players enjoy Madden Games so much. They're a thousand iterations ahead.