Collection essentials #458 & #459: NFL 2K (DC) & NFL 2K1

The biggest American football video game franchise in history which continues to this day, as you may know, is the Madden series. So it was more than a little concerning when EA, the developer of Madden and a variety of other games on many consoles, decided that they weren’t going to develop any games at all for the Dreamcast. But thankfully for Sega, at least in the football department, they had a more-than-adequate plan B for getting the sport onto their new console. They tasked a company called Visual Concepts with making a brand new football game from scratch. And thus, NFL 2K would be on store shelves on day one when the Dreamcast launched in North America.

As previously mentioned, the Dreamcast when it first launched was considerably more powerful than any other console on the market. Americans were all about the latest cutting-edge graphics. And more realism in sports games was definitely something that was going to turn heads. And that’s exactly what NFL 2K delivered. With excellent graphics, and a presentation that mimicked a real TV broadcast, this was pretty much the first time that other people who happen to be in the room might actually be fooled into thinking you’re watching sports on TV at first glance or if they’re only partially paying attention. 

And thankfully, Visual Concepts didn’t just come up with a nice-looking game and leave it at that. NFL 2K plays wonderfully. The controls are spot on, the computer AI is reasonably smart and not that easy to take advantage of, and the game implements and rewards real football strategy. The pace of play is nice and snappy, too. As the game mimics a real TV broadcast, obviously there are cutaways and replays and such in between plays, but the player can quickly skip them if they want to just get right down to playing the game itself, which is really nice.

One downside at times to multiplayer American football games is that it’s often hard to hide which play you’re running when your opponent is looking on the same screen. A neat option in NFL 2K is that you can use the screen on your Dreamcast’s VMU memory card inserted into your controller so that opponents can’t see what you’re running! The downside is that you don’t get a preview of what the play actually is like when you’re selecting on the big screen, so you do need to already be familiar with the playbook to use this effectively. But it’s still a super cool option.

Like Madden, NFL 2K would become a series that released a new game for each season, with updated rosters along with other upgrades. I’m not the type that wants to collect every single year of a sports franchise, as you can tell from the lack of Madden games so far in this blog. So why am I including NFL 2K1? Well, the main reason is because it’s the one I’ve played the most. But it is a very legitimate upgrade over the original. Most notably, 2K1 adds online play and “franchise mode” (a mode in many sports games which has you manage a team across multiple seasons).

As for my personal history, I definitely remember NFL 2K being a big deal at the launch of the Dreamcast. I sometimes got to see and play it at other people’s houses, and it was very impressive. Then, when I got my own Dreamcast in 2003, NFL 2K1 was the one that I got, and it quickly became my go-to fix for video game football and I got a nice amount of play time from it. The copy in the photo is not my original, though.

Are these games worth revisiting today? They certainly are still fun to play. But the answer is, probably not, but only because there’s a better NFL 2K game that would be released a few years later. But that’s a topic for another day! Even though they may not technically be the best NFL 2K games out they’re, they were huge parts of the Dreamcast’s success and are games that I strongly associate with the console. And for that, they’re essentials in my book.