NFL

American football on PC — that was something in the nineties, like finding Sierra game graphics on a player card you never even looked for. NFL from 1992 isn't a legend, but it is what you get when you take the most basic simulator without any attempt to push it anywhere.

It's a text-based, or at best very simple graphical simulation of American football. Be a league player, team management, or jump into a single match. You assemble formations, input signals, call plays — sequences of actions that players follow unless something unexpected happens. There aren't actually field views with little characters running around and catching the ball. The game is more abstract — you're dealing with statistics, success percentages, whether the receiver catches the pass or whether that ten-yard zone goes through uninterrupted.

The controls are appropriate for DOS — keyboard, menus, command input. This isn't about action thrills, more about thinking: which quarterback to field, which play will be more successful? Graphics, if there's any at all, that's not it. Don't expect realistic player representation. What does work, though, is the logic — the game maintains serious ratios between teams, error rates, physical dispositions of positions. For games of that era, it was a solid foundation.

There were far more interestingly designed sports simulators out there — legends like Front Page Sports. Still, NFL from '92 deserves credit for approaching forwards without unnecessary embellishment. No smileys here, no pop-art. It's a bare-bones simulator you pick up when you're actually interested in American football and don't want a graphic designer mucking about in it.

Today you can play it in DOSBox more as a history notebook of simulators. If you're an NFL fan and curious how strategic American football games were played thirty years ago, you'll find it in the archives. And it's not even such a rough attempt — it's a lean one that knows exactly what it wants to be.