10-Yard Fight (NES) Playthrough
133A playthrough of Nintendo's 1985 football game for the NES, 10-Yard Fight.
I play through every level in this video:
0:03 High School team
20:28 College team
40:07 Professional team
59:49 Playoff team
1:19:36 Super Bowl team
When it was released at the end of 1983, Irem's 10-Yard Fight was met with a lot of enthusiasm. It was hailed as one of the first "accurate" depictions of American football in a video game, and its top-notch presentation and smooth playability propelled it to the top of the charts in its day.
A short while later, Nintendo worked out a deal securing the rights to produce home versions of Irem's biggest 1983 titles - 10-Yard Fight and Spartan X (Kung Fu) - for the fledgling Famicom platform, and both games were shipped in time for the US launch of the NES in late 1985.
The NES version of 10-Yard Fight, developed by Tose, was not only a big step up from any football games previously seen on the Atari 2600, the Intellivision, or the Colecovision, but also from its arcade counterpart. The console iteration's introduction of a new two-player mode and the ability to play both offense and defense went a long way in compensating for the slight cutbacks that had to be made to the graphics and sound.
The gameplay is extraordinarily simple. There are no plays to call, and on offense, you can run the ball, pass it off to a running back, or fire it off at a long receiver, while defense is a mad scramble to take down the ball carrier.
It lacks any of the depth and nuance of real football, but there's a certain charm to its simplicity that makes it a lot of fun to play. 10-Yard Fight doesn't hold up as well as most of the NES's early sports titles - what was a marvel in 1985 ended up looking spartan and overly basic by the time Tecmo Bowl showed up in 1989 - but it was an impressive first showing for the sport on the system.
Remember when you could buy sports games that weren't riddled with microtransactions? Ones that didn't require you to create an EA account? I miss that.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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