When it comes to football video games, there's no question that the two most iconic games in human history are Nintendo's Tecmo Bowl & EA Sports' Madden NFL. What makes these games so special? Bo Jackson & Michael Vick.
Let's start this story where it all begins and that is in 1989 when Nintendo became the first console to have a football game that featured NFL players with their release of "Tecmo Bowl." This game captured the world by storm, and how could it not? The year 1989 was one of the greatest years in the history of the NFL with superstars dominating the league, such as Joe Montana, Barry Sanders, Jerry Rice & Reggie White. But none of those players could even play on the same field as Bo Jackson in the game of Tecmo Bowl. Bo Jackson's dominance was already a real-life legend, but the magic that Tecmo Bowl gave the world's greatest athlete was incredible. Tecmo Bowl's controls were very simple as the Raiders' only running plays in the game belonged to Marcus Allen and Jackson, and let's just say Bo knows how to score...every single time he touched the ball.
Bo's dominance became such a problem that it actually became cheating to use the Oakland Raiders in a game of Tecmo Bowl against one of your buddies. There is nothing worse than the dude that comes over to your house to play some Nintendo and he spends the entire game just handing the ball off to Bo Jackson and you are just chasing him around the field like a loser. Which leads us to our next topic of discussion: 2004 Madden's Michael Vick.
"Madden NFL" didn't start using real-life players until Madden NFL '95, but it wasn't until the year 2004 that they created their own version of Tecmo Bowl's Bo Jackson. Michael Vick had only played one full season when he was awarded the cover of Madden 2004, and that was all the game-makers needed to see to create the greatest QB in video game history. Madden gave him an insane 95 rating in speed & 94 rating in acceleration, then combined that with a 97 rating in throw power to create an absolute BEAST!!!
So the question remains, who was more dominant? Almost an impossible question to answer, but pulling off the impossible is exactly what both these players did on a consistent basis so let me give this a try..
Dominance and Bo Jackson go together like hot cocoa on a cold, winter night and you can see in the video above that Tecmo Bowl's version of Bo Jackson was just a superhero that was wearing a Raiders uniform in a video game. His speed was at the very minimum 2x the speed of any player in the game, which literally made him an IMPOSSIBLE figure to tackle. Is this enough to make him more dominant than Vick though?
What Mike Vick was able to pull off in the 2004 Madden was something we had never seen before. The ability to not only scramble away from defenders, but to seperate from the DBs on the long runs was revolutionary in the Madden universe. He was everything we had wanted and more as Madden players, BUT there is one factor about Vick that gives Bo the edge in this battle of video game dominance and that is Vick's inability to hold on to the football when he got tackled on the run. With a carry rating of only 54, this dude used to drop the ball like it was hot nearly half the time he was hit and NOTHING would make me destroy a Xbox controller faster than a classic Vick fumble 40 yards down field.
So because of all those broken Xbox controllers in my childhood, Tecmo Bowl's Bo Jackson will forever be king.