Tecmo Super Bowl (NES) Playthrough [2022, Bengals season]

A playthrough of Tecmo's 1991 football game for the NES, Tecmo Super Bowl.

I uploaded a video of Tecmo Super Bowl last year on Super Bowl Sunday in which I played as the 49ers. I thought it would be fun to revisit the game as a team playing in this year's Super Bowl, so this video shows an entire season, playoffs, and the Super Bowl played as the Cincinnati Bengals.

If you'd like to see last year's video, played as the San Francisco 49ers, you can find it at    • Tecmo Super Bowl (NES) Playthrough [2...  

Tecmo Super Bowl is one of those rare games that was not only a massive success when it was released, but one that has continued to gain in popularity over the years since. What makes TSB even more unusual, though, it is part of a genre where games tend to be discarded and forgotten about within a year. How then does a lone NES football cart manage to stay relevant for nearly thirty years?

(Well, I mean besides not being related to Electronic Arts in any way.)

I'm not sure that there's a single reason for it, but TSB was a landmark game, and American nostalgia is huge on this one. It is based on the NFL's 1991 season schedule, and it was the first game to feature the licensed use of both NFL team and player names.

It's a fast-paced, arcade style game that was a blast with two players (as long as you both agreed that the Raiders were off-limits - Bo Jackson, damn!), and it introduced all sorts of things to the original Tecmo Bowl formula that gave it just enough depth to keep in interesting without overcomplicating it. Now included are things like the coin toss, fumbles, injuries, the tracking of individual player stats across games, player substitutions, and you can't forget those cutscenes, which have been amped up considerably since the original Tecmo Bowl!

Tecmo's cutscenes were always awesome - whether you were playing Ninja Gaiden, Bad News Baseball, or Tecmo Super Bowl, those colorful cartoon scenes were always good for stirring up some hype.

But the graphics overall were pretty amazing for the NES. Two full teams appear on the field at once without any slowdown, and the animation was pretty good for little stick-men characters. Why is everything so pink though?

And who could ever forget those voice samples? "Ready....Down... HUT, HUT, HUT, HUT!" Or if you were playing as Bo Jackson, you'd be hearing "TOUCHDOWN!" every ten seconds as you pulled off an 80+ point lead against the AI or a younger sibling.

Overall, Tecmo Super Bowl is a ridiculously great time and I don't even like football. I sure I'm not the only one to feel that way!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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