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This is the fourth issue of Fan Service: a newsletter about video game fandom, history, and preservation.

The year is 1991. The NY Giants have just won the Super Bowl. Joe Montana is the best player in the NFL. And Tecmo Super Bowl for the Nintendo Entertainment System — a hotly anticipated sequel to the acclaimed Tecmo Bowl — has just revolutionized the sports video game. 

“We were all blown away by the giant leap the sequel was from the original,” says fan developer SBlueman. The original Tecmo Bowl was a big hit, and still looms large in the consciousness of many sports fans who came of age in the late eighties.

But its sequel, Tecmo Super Bowl, was the first licensed NFL game in history: meaning all 28 NFL teams and their rosters were represented in the game. This set a new standard for what was expected from a sports video game.

Most importantly, the game was fun to play, especially with other people. “That fun factor it has is what I believe has let it stand the test of time and still be considered one of, if not the best, football video game of all time,” says SBlueman.

Before writing this issue, I had never played anything from the Tecmo Bowl series. I was born in 1993, a few years after the heyday of these games. Booting up Tecmo Super Bowl now, the first thing that strikes me is its delicate marriage of complexity and simplicity. This thing looks incredible for an NES game, rendering all the interactions that happen on a football field with a clarity more familiar to Super Nintendo titles than NES titles. Not to mention the super stylish animations that play during field goals and completed passes. The game itself is easy to pick up and understand, and although offense certainly takes precedence over defense, it’s hard to nitpick about that when you’re dominating the CPU with a completely broken Bo Jackson. 

What really surprised me though was the depth of the game’s “simulation” mode.  One of the great joys of the sports video game is witnessing how an alternate universe of competition plays out if you were the master of that universe. Any fan of a sports team will assure you that they know more than both the coach and GM of whatever team they’re a fan of — and a video game simulation mode is the further affirmation of that delusion. In modern games, this experience can be bogged down by tasks that aren’t really fundamental to what makes that core fantasy feel special. In Tecmo Super Bowl, the simulation is stripped to its bare essentials while still providing real depth. There is no roster construction, trading, player development, or annoying press conferences with hackneyed dialogue options to sit through. Instead, the game provides a single season of NFL football, allowing you to play as any team at any point during the season. It’s interesting to think about what is deemed essential here, and in the end, the ethos of Tecmo Super Bowl appears to always be fun first, realism later. 

But let’s fast forward a bit. 

The year is 2023, and we are living through the darkest hours of the football video game. 

Madden remains wildly popular, but even its biggest fans feel frustrated at its lack of innovation and blatantly predatory microtransactions. 

And yet, at least one football video game franchise has only gotten better with age. 

Thanks to its vibrant fan community, Tecmo Super Bowl is regularly updated each year with new rosters and player ratings. The latest roster update for the 2023 season is available now, the resulting effort of SBlueman and, he reminds me, many other fan developers who have created the tools to make these updates possible. 

SBlueman caught the Tecmo Bowl bug way back when it was released in 1987. Later, during the early days of the internet, he came across the official Tecmo forums and other (now shuttered) websites like Tecmo Super Bowl Heaven. For over 20 years though, the meeting hub of the Tecmo fandom has been at Tecmobowl.org, which still has plenty of active members and updates. That’s where SBlueman first started messing around with ROM hacking. “The conversations and notes shared on that site led me to begin dabbling in editing the game for myself,” he says. “You start with a tweak here, correcting a mis-spelled name there and before you know it you are completely under the hood trying to figure out what else can be done.”

SBlueman released his first roster update in 2000, but stopped for a while in 2004 before reviving the project in recent years. Now, he aims for at least three updates a year: one before the season, another during the season, and one at its conclusion.

The work of updating rosters with new players and ratings is a monumental task, one usually handled by massive dev teams for modern sports games. SBlueman does most of that work on his own, and he takes it seriously. “I usually run thousands of simulated seasons before the editing is all said and done,” he says. 

SBlueman’s roster updates are just one piece of a bigger fandom keeping the spirit of Tecmo alive. Similar roster efforts exist for NCAA rosters. Other ROM hacks have improved things like CPU A.I. and the game’s overall balance of difficulty. There are also still Tecmo Super Bowl tournaments, like the Tundra Bowl, hosted throughout the country. 

After all these years, the appeal of these early sports titles has only gotten more obvious with time. Or put even more directly by SBlueman: “Tecmo Super Bowl is what the Madden series hasn't been in a long time, fun.”

You can download SBlueman’s Tecmo Super Bowl 2023 hack now.

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✨Play Tecmo Super Bowl in your browser at archive.org✨

✨ Watch the ESPN / NFL Films retrospective of Tecmo Bowl✨

✨Read “The Legend of ‘Tecmo Super Bowl’” at The Ringer ✨

✨Read Jon Bois’ simulation sports epic, The Death of Basketball ✨

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