Trendsetters: The 10 Most Significant Games

8/26/2008 6:16 PM | 9 Comments | Page 3 of 10

Dr. J. and Larry Bird Go One-on-One
(Electronic Arts, for every system of the time from ColecoVision to TRS-80, 1983)

Think back to 1983, a time when William Shatner was the spokesman for Commodore. Alan Alda can still be found hyping Atari, but George Plimpton has wrapped up his relationship with Intellivision. Companies have licensed league names for games. Atari has even licensed an athlete for one of its games -- the 2600 game, Pele Championship Soccer.

One company has quietly begun work on a project called John Madden Football, but the project falls through. Tom Zito, who goes on to create Sewer Shark and Night Trap, wanted to make a full-motion video (FMV) football game with Madden as coach. He eventually completes the project as Quarterback Attack, but Madden was replaced by Mike Ditka.

Even if Zito had bagged Madden, Electronic Arts, the game would not have come out for nearly a decade. Zito's FMV games were designed for laserdisc and later released on CD-ROM. He made several games in the early '80s, but was unable to release them for nearly a decade, until SEGA released a CD peripheral for Genesis.

Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, was working on a non-Madden project at the time. He paid 76ers superstar Julius Erving $25,000 for permission to use his name and likeness in a basketball game. Later he offered the same deal to Larry Bird, and the game became known as Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One.

In subsequent interviews, Hawkins claimed that while Bird remained fairly aloof, Erving was very hands on with the project, adding moves and ideas. John Madden NFL and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! would come later, but Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One was the game that started the sports licensing craze.

"I loved Dr. J and Larry Bird," says David Kushner. "I think that what that game had and why it rang true, was that it was the first "aha" moment in which I could play like these guys. I remember playing it and the idea was that the game characters behaved like their real-life counterparts. It gave gamers their first taste of the Madden universe that was to come."

True, without Dr. J and Larry Bird, there would never have been a Bill Laimbeer Combat Basketball or a Shaq Fu; but the world might also have missed out on Madden NFL, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Tiger Woods PGA Tour.