I have a treadmill in front of my television and have learned that a full game of NHL 23 for the Playstation 4 is about 36 minutes. Walking that while playing gets me a good chunk of my desired activity for the day, and I get to tell people I am “getting my steps in by playing hockey.” I then hope to god I can change the subject before asked a follow-up question.
The general movement of the puck and players for NHL 23 (released a couple of years ago) is fast, but when I started NHL 96 for the Sega Genesis on its most difficult mode, I really was surprised at the speed of the game. I played most hockey games for the Genesis and PC as they were published, but I didn’t want to rely on memory for this article. Last year I tried Brett Hull Hockey, an unreleased prototype for the Atari Jaguar, and that game – on much “better” hardware than the Genesis! – is so slow and choppy it is unplayable. I’m happy to say that NHL 96 is insanely quick. Chalk it up to whatever you like, and I am someone who is a Jaguar supporter: the teams that made the NHL games for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo had “best of class” engineering skills.
NHL ’94 (from what I can tell, EA dropped the apostrophe for NHL 96) is the game that has entered the collective zeitgeist of our culture, and it’s easy to tell why: the Sega and SNES versions had all the teams: the Sharks, Lighting, Ducks and Senators. That instance of the Sharks are probably the worst team ever depicted in video game history for the four major North American sports. The uniforms, in reality and on the NHL games, were so dynamic and beautiful and that teal was nothing any sports team had ever used before. The ultimate challenge for video game hockey players in the 1990s was winning the Stanley Cup with that iteration of the San Jose Sharks.
NHL 96 is that game – 94 – perfected. Fighting is back and while silly in a video game because “messages” cannot be sent in the same way that it can be sent in reality, it’s there and breaks up the action. Manual goalie control was put into NHL 95 and continues over here, which is critical for real head to head play.
(The PC version of NHL 96 was the first entry in the series to use polygons. That game looks terrible. NHL 95 for the PC looked terrible when I bought it new and it looks worse now. By NHL 98, the franchise on PC had become a genuinely good-looking and good-playing one.)
NHL 96 was about as far as the 2D “sprite” version could go, but it was at the top of that kind of technology. There’s one-timers, fake shots and playoff modes for single elimination of best of 7 series. What I found, when picking the playoff modes, is that you kind of cycle through various teams that could meet in the playoffs until you get one you like. I wasn’t able to see how to really pick a specific opponent, which I guess made things easier since there were Conference restrictions. The difficulty mode of “All-Star” made it rather difficult for me to score, and what I found is that the computer was pretty good if I got my goalie out of position by moving him manually. I usually played as the Buffalo Sabres, so I knew that every time Dominik Hasek let up a goal, our local dickwad “columnist” at the time would be picking a fight with him. Picking a fight with the, you know, greatest goaltender in NHL history. Well, it’s me AND the Dominator together in that against him in NHL 96.
(I’m sure he’s revolving in his grave that he can’t work hard and put in the extra hours to try to run Josh Allen out of town right now.)
Speaking of putting in the extra hours, I don’t know how much of this was developed in-house, but Electronic Arts as a publisher in this time period were one of the most disgustingly sickening employers in tech shortly by this point. Dragged into the spotlight thanks to the anonymous (at the time) LiveJournal post from ea_spouse, Electronic Arts was ordered to pay $14.7 million dollars to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit over unpaid overtime. Wage thieves! The way you treat people in this world matters, and everyone involved in the settlement would have been locked up in a just world. The one we live in is one where stealing doesn’t count when it’s done through payroll. I stopped supporting EA as a publisher decades ago and I hope you do, too.