Collection essentials #580: ESPN NFL 2K5 (Xbox)

I previously showcased NFL 2K and NFL 2K1 for the Sega Dreamcast. Those were the first games in a new series from Visual Concepts and Sega, and set a new bar for what fans expected out of American football games. Their graphics were, at the time, unparalleled. Gameplay and presentation were similarly excellent. 

It didn’t take real long for competitors to start taking big shots at the new high bar. In particular, once the extremely popular Madden series hit the PlayStation 2 for the 2000-2001 season, 2K had a very worthy opponent. For a few years in a row, both franchises would pump out a quality new football game and be greeted with highly positive review scores and great sales numbers. The early 2000s were arguably the best era for sports video games in history up to this point, as there was both a high quantity and quality of titles available for whatever spot you were interested in.

You’ll notice I skipped a few years. So what is special about ESPN NFL 2K5 in particular? Well, for reasons I’ll hold off on mentioning, it is the last NFL 2K game we ever got. It’s also the best one. 

The previous year, Sega had reached an agreement with ESPN, one of the top American sports TV channels, and this agreement carried over to a second game. This meant that NFL 2K could use ESPN logos, branding, and certain personalities from the network. As a sports fan, this is a great improvement that makes it feel even more like you’re playing a real sporting event, with recognizable ESPN people such as Chris Berman and Mel Kiper offering commentary in certain modes. The play-by-play announcers are still the same as in previous NFL 2K titles, two guys who are not real-life broadcasters, but they are more than sufficient in their role anyway.

As you’d hope and expect from a sports game of this era, there are a variety of modes on offer. You’ve got a quality franchise mode where you take your teams through NFL seasons. Another mode lets you jump into one of 25 different famous historical NFL moments to see if you can recreate the success of the original teams…or perhaps reverse history! Some of the modes are pretty creative, such as “The Crib,” where you can decorate your own “crib” with stuff that you’ve earned, and real-life celebrities will call you on the phone in this mode and challenge you to games using their special all-star teams. There’s a “first person” mode that gives you the exact view of a player on the field. There’s the ability to set up a custom game state and then start play exactly at that point. There’s a tournament mode for any combination of human and computer players. And of course, the game originally had online play with servers that are now long gone. 

There’s a variety of customization features, too, such as the ability to make your own teams and players and the ability to edit player celebrations. The Xbox version of this game is also compatible with the console’s “custom soundtracks” feature, so you can set up whatever music or sound clips you want to play during certain parts of a game such as scoring a touchdown. You won’t see anything like that in any recent sports games!

ESPN knew they had a great football game that shined in every area, though Madden was still a major nemesis. They made a very bold move in order to try to get a leg up on them. Back then, video games typically retailed for $49.99, and Madden NFL 2005 was no exception. And so, ESPN decided to undercut them with a price of…well, what would you expect? Maybe $39.99? No…they went for a budget price of $19.99, less than HALF of what most new video games cost! This was an incredible and unprecedented move that led to plenty of gamers flocking away from Madden in favor of Sega’s game. 

EA Sports was understandably pretty freaked out by being so hugely undercut in the price department, seeing their sales drop as a result. And so, they did something pretty controversial. Before the following season, they came to an agreement with both the NFL and NFLPA which gave them exclusive rights to make video games with official NFL teams and players. This was a titanic shift and killed the NFL 2K series overnight. The exclusivity agreement remains to this day over 20 years later, and unfortunately the quantity and quality of NFL video games has decreased substantially as a result due to EA’s monopoly. 

As for my own experience, I had first enjoyed NFL 2K and 2K1 on the Dreamcast when they were somewhat new. However, as the mid-2000s rolled around, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to sports games and was only vaguely aware of the drama that was going down between Sega and EA. In 2006, though, I got the “spark” to really start following sports, and therefore I gained a new interest in seeking out some sports video games. Back then, the previous year’s sports titles were usually dirt cheap, so I grabbed ESPN NFL 2K5 and Madden NFL 2005 for almost nothing. I was pleased to experience the evolution of the 2K series which I already had a fondness for, and I put a good amount of time into 2K5. 

I also think that Madden NFL 2005 is a very good game and I considered putting it on this list. I figured maybe I ought to have at least one Madden title among my essentials since it is one of the most successful and famous sports video game franchises in existence. But at the end of the day, I never really got particularly attached to Madden even though I’ve had fun playing the games here and there. Madden NFL 2005 is good, but I liked ESPN NFL 2K5 more.

Many still consider ESPN NFL 2K5 the best American football game of all time, and I’m not really one to disagree. The only real flaw that comes to mind is that the game’s AI is sometimes exploitable. For example, I found out that I can clear “The Drive” as John Elway simply by doing a “quarterback sneak” over and over again since the defense would never place a defender right in the middle to stop me. 

It’s a darn shame that this great series got murdered so young, and that we’ve been robbed of a competitive landscape of different football games for over two whole decades and counting. At least no one can ever take away 2K5, which is never going to get ported or remade but is cheap to get in its original form at least. There’s no doubt that it’s a deserving essential in my collection, as a gamer and sports fan.