Rank the 10 best sports video games of all time

We’ll be dealing with a lot of long-running sports franchises that start with that deep-voiced man telling us it’s in the game. The first of these is NHL 2002.

This is true for a lot of different reasons. First, it shows a real hockey season in which many players who would later be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame were on the team.

The weird, off-the-wall commentary from Jim Hughson and Don Taylor and the collectible celebrations and game changes that you unlocked through a sticker book that was a prototype of Ultimate Team will stay with everyone who played it for a long time.

But most of all, NHL 2002‘s action was just right. It had just the right amount of cartoon violence like NHL ’94, but it didn’t lose sight of what hockey is all about. In short, slapshots feel like they could break a tectonic plate, but player movement and game speed are still convincing. We may have come for the fights, but we stayed for the sport.

After reading the headline, that Outkast song is probably already playing in your head. That’s just how deep Tiger Woods ’04 hit.

For a short time, golf was cool, thanks to the star power of Tiger Woods, a soundtrack with R&B elements, and simple but subtle controls. Yes, you could walk around the well-known courses in Nike pants and a sweater vest, and there were a lot of clubs to unlock, change, and think about in the trading park. But we had been getting that from golf games for years.

This one was better than the rest because it looked good, had a deep and interesting career mode, and had a character creator that looked like it came from the Tony Hawk’s series. Plus, it just moves in a way that we like.

As much as the genre is about capturing the glamour and passion of the worlds we build around sports, it is also about the physical discipline. In 1983, the legendary arcade game Track & Field came up with an irresistible way to show athletic discipline: hit some buttons as hard as you can.

How fast can you hit the buttons on your Atari 2600 pad? Is it cheating if you try the tea towel trick? What about the trick with the lighter? If you know, you already know. It might seem silly to think about these things now, but in the early 1980s, they were the most important questions on the world’s agenda.

Yes, 37 years of improvements have made it seem a little bit old-fashioned. But Track & Field went slow so that FIFA could go fast. So Mario Party could get together. So that QWOP could… well, do whatever it is that QWOP does. To honour it, destroy a $70 control pad.

In the early 2000s, EA Tiburon really hit on something. The Madden series took longer than its stablemates NHL and FIFA to find the fun in throwing, running, catching, and steamrolling, but when it did, throwing and catching a Hail Mary was like hearing The Beatles for the first time.

Some people say that the best game from this time was Madden NFL 2003. But by Madden 2005, the controls were a little bit smoother, the game’s flow was a little bit easier to follow, and the chances to break the lines were a little bit more exciting. It was also much crunchier, which is important in a game where you smash armoured soldiers together.

Right, we know we said we were going to focus on simulations, but you can’t have a list of the best sports games without including one that brought gamers and non-gamers together. Basket Random was played by everyone, even your grandmother, and for good reason.

You may remember that Wii Sports was a big hit with parents. You’d be at a friend’s house, trying out their brand-new Wii. Their mother would peek in to say hello, and then she would say, “Oh! What is it? And you just move that thing around to control it, right?”

And all of a sudden, you’re in a boxing match with your close friend’s mother. She’s throwing uppercuts at you, and you’re wondering if she’s wearing the wrist guard like you told her to.

That was Nintendo’s unit shifter at its most brilliant. Like Track & Field before it, Wii Sports found a new way to play boxing, bowling, golf, tennis, and baseball that was so interesting that even people who didn’t play video games had to join in.

The presentation is almost without rival. The subtleties of pitching and running the bases are made clear. When a bat is connected to a ball, it feels like swimming with dolphins. This has been true pretty much from the beginning of MLB: The Show until the current game.

But it wasn’t until the beginning of the 2010s that Sony’s San Diego Studio really got it. Now in its fifth version, Road to the Show was an irresistible rags-to-riches RPG within a sports game. In 2011, MLB’s MyCareer was just a little bit better in this way than NBA2MyCareer. K’s Even though it has changed a lot, the Pure Analog control system is still used in modern games. Would you believe that they even made it fun to use a motion controller? Who is Wii Sports?

The one who destroys controllers. Many a bitter headset mic soliloquy has been based on this. Every 3.4 seconds, someone somewhere in the world says that someone else made up a lie. We still play it every year, right?

Yes, it would have been easy for us to choose FIFA ’97.

We thought about putting FIFA 2003 at the top of the list. But the thing about FIFA ’12 is that EA is still working on improving it.

Ultimate Team has always been a gravity-sucking maw, but in FIFA it is even worse. Because it didn’t get old for us in 2011. People yelling at Messi while sitting in gaming chairs was something we hadn’t seen in years. Even just seeing someone enjoy a nice piece of salmon was new. This was when FIFA was at its best, before people started spending a lot of money on it to make the best team of virtual football players.

Most modern sports games try to show as much as possible about the sport they are based on, but NBA Jam: Tournament Edition went in a different direction in 1994. It asked the simple question, “What do players really want to do when they load a basketball cartridge?” (We were in the 1990s. Cartridges. Grunge, Melrose Place.)

The obvious answer was “run end to end and dunk on each other from 25 feet.” It knew just what to take away—everything except those things—and how to make what was left stand out: flames. You got it as soon as you saw it, but many years later, you were still trying to find the right combination and find the elegance in the flamboyance. Yes, it’s more over the top than most of these games, but that’s part of what makes it so fun.

We had to put a break between this one and FIFA to keep the tunnel from getting all Keane vs. Viera. So goes the rivalry between these two great football simulation games that have been around for a long time. PES, or eFootball as it’s now called, has always been a little bit different. It was made with one eye on fast-paced arcade games and a willingness to change the beautiful game so that 10 minutes of play can have drama and consequences instead of 90.

PES 6 is the pinnacle of this arcade-styled idea. Players look like they’re running on a maxed-out treadmill in a silent movie and play for teams like Pompey and Middlebrook, but try to argue that realism is more important than adrenaline after 85 minutes. It’s too bad that PES has been going downhill lately, but this is what Konami needs to do to get back to what makes the series good.

NBA 2K might be the most impressive of all the games on this list, which honour and remember them. Over the last ten years, Visual Concepts has made a basketball game that is almost like a living ecosystem. It is a walk-in world where your face-scanned player rises from college ball obscurity to real stardom in a way that is reminiscent of a cheesy TV movie, and where shoving someone in the paint and knocking them out feels just as good as making a poster of them.

NBA 2K17, also known as 2K16 but without that Spike Lee story, is the best of these games. Before you had to pay VC to get a haircut, it was a turning point. The game’s mechanics were as smooth as Italian marble, player builds were balanced but not limiting, and Michael B. Jordan’s role as an improbably dominant point guard and the other half of “Orange Juice” in MyCareer was only a little bit annoying.

Later games added more online features, but the basics have never been done better. And basketball is a game that is all about the basics.

If you’ve had enough sports, our list of the best RPG games has more correct opinions. We did say “games” twice because that’s how cool we are.