Collection essentials #242: Pro Quarterback (SNES)

Let me start off by saying: this game is AWFUL. It may be the very worst game that I’m covering in this entire series. Why is it on the list? If you’ve been reading up to this point, you can probably guess it’s because it’s a game that I played when I was a kid. And you’d be right.

Pro Quarterback is, as one would assume, an American Football video game, and it was released early in the console’s lifespan. And oh boy, it shows, it seems like the developers hadn’t learned to program a game for the new hardware yet. The graphics not only are ugly, but the framerate is terrible, with the action looking choppier than any other SNES game you’ll ever see.

The game is pretty lacking in features, too. There’s no season or playoff much, just the ability to pick a couple teams, tweak a few options, and play one game. There’s no license from the NFL or the player’s association, so no real teams or player names are used. The teams are clearly based on the real NFL teams from that time, with their names being the cities they play in and with uniform colors that resemble their real-life counterparts. The game’s playbook is pretty limited too. When passing to a receiver, you can’t press different buttons to throw to different receivers like you can in most other football games (granted, that probably wasn’t the standard yet back in 1992). 

I mentioned, when talking about a previous football game, that playing against the computer in a sports game often involves finding one particular play or move that beats the A.I. pretty much every time. The one such play in Pro Quarterback is pretty amusing: it’s the Fake Field Goal!! When you do a Fake Field Goal, even if you’re WAY out of field goal range, you’re going to have the receiver wide open well downfield pretty much every single time and will get lots of yards. It’s actually kind of hilarious. And it’s hard to defend against, because when the offense selects the Fake Field Goal, the team on defense is FORCED into field goal formation regardless of what the player actually picked, so you can’t defend against it how you’d like to (I don’t think defensive audibles are possible, but I could technically be wrong).

My cousins Kevin and Peter owned this game when I was a young kid, so I would play it at their house. I think we were a little oblivious as to how bad this game was, but once I got a little older and fired it up again, I was like, “OOOOH wow this is bad.” The cartridge shown is my childhood copy which I believe first belonged to them. I must have gotten it from them at some point and I don’t remember how. Pro Quarterback, kudos to you for being the very worst game that I still feel attached to. You’re a real “mess-ential”.