Brett Favre at linebacker, Shannon Sharpe at QB, Ricky Williams at Safety.
All of these things were possible for the first time ever in a football video game when NFL Street hit game consoles in 2004.
That's right, the ultimate pick up and play street football game is now 10 years old. I think we all feel old and began growing grey hair. I'll make even more people feel old due to the fact that in 2004 I was 11.
NFL Street was the cousin to EA's wildly successful NBA Street series and EA Sports Big was on a role in the early 2000s in terms of the games that were coming out so expanding the Street series to football made sense.
What set NFL Street apart from other games was that it fully embraced the fact that it wasn't a series to have teams and players playing in official stadiums or wearing full team gear. It never ever meant to take itself seriously and I mean how could it when you could play in an open fruit market in Houston and have a basket full of watermelon explode in front of your Wide receiver if he ran into it?
The different venues included open parking lots, beaches and roof top fields across the US and it didn't take itself seriously either by having hilarious player voice overs and obstacles on the field that could make your player fumble the football!
Hey there goes Ahman Green down the sidelines ohhhhh he just tripped over a garbage can and fumbled the ball out of bounds! Rough luck for the Pack!"
Players didn't have to wear their team jerseys, some wore EA Sports T shirts or just a team shirt as well as shades, du rags or baseball caps.
Pads? Aside from maybe some shoulder pads that's all guys wore! Helmets? Pfffttt. Actual equipment beyond a jersey and cleats didn't exist in Street, besides you'd just be slowed down to realistic speeds by wearing all of that stuff anyway.
Field goals and punting? Child please, none of that was around in the series, when 4th down came you had two options, do I throw or run for the first down. No looking at a 50 yard field goal through some make shift goal posts on this game!
Time limits? Nope. You played until you reached a set point total or amount of trick points depending on the type of game mode you wanted to play and my oh my could games go on long. A typical game up to 36 and you'd have a good 35-40 minute game but if you decided to test your endurance by playing up to 50 or more points? Depending on how good you were on D, you were looking at a 90 minute battle possibly.
You were not even bound to having all of the players stay on their set teams, pick up game mode allowed you to do it much like you'd pick teams back In the day. Want to have Ray Lewis and Jerry Rice on the same team? It was possible.
The game embraced the hip hop culture even more than the Madden games did by having names from the hip hop world such as DJ Kayslay and The X-Ecutioners as unlockable players in the game.
Oh and the Gamebreakers! Much like NBA street if you got enough style points built up by scoring, showboating or great defensive plays you could fill up your Gamebreaker meter to be able to essentially give your whole team a super human boost for a play on offence or Defence.
Scoring on a team that had a Gamebreaker active was probably the hardest thing to do since throwing the ball would be an instant interception and a run play would almost all of the time result In a fumble if you were jolted with a most likely now non concussion era friendly hit.
The over the top Arcade feel of Street allowed anyone to pick up and play without getting too lost in terms of what was going on and you even could import players from Street into Madden and NCAA football if you wanted to!
I remember with my boys having LOOOOOOOONG tournaments of Street where we'd start playing at 8 PM and probably wouldn't stop until 1 in the morning. The games got heated too and boy howdy if someone was able to active a Gamebreaker on defense or scored on someone with an active Gamebreaker my oh my would we scream loudly into the Canadian night.
Street evolved into an awesome series with it's sequels NFL Street 2 and 3 but then EA decided to go in a different direction with the series to essentially making it more jn line to what a Madden game would be by giving it a complete facelift and rebranding the game NFL Tour in 2008.
I never had a chance to get my hands on Tour due to the fact that I never purchased an XBOX 360 or a PS3 to play it on but from numerous reviews and game play videos it wasn't a game that was going to be embraced as it stripped away almost every over the top element that made it famous, there was no rap music and two way football was done away with. It was still an arcade game but just barley looked or played like one.
Arcade football games and the Arcade sports genre as a whole is a dying thing. People crave ultra realism in the sports games and NFL Street was absolutely not that at all. I mean seriously I once won a game in which I put William Perry at QB and my running back was Howie Long. (Yup, the game had an NFL legends team too).
Street was even more at times Arcade-y than NFL Blitz was! Sure Blitz allowed a Quarterback to throw the ball 80 yards, it had a ton of celebrations as well as hard hits but through every incarnation of NFL Blitz the teams wore official NFL jerseys and played in official stadiums or as close to NFL like stadiums and you couldn't customize jerseys or player appearances! Street tested out things that no other game even thought of doing and it's a game that every once in a while I still pop into my PS2 and play for a few hours (Yes in 2014 I still play on a PS2).
It's cool to see how Madden is changing and making Football games come to life with every new version of the game, but I'm quite content to stay in my arcade world and clothesline a showboating Trent Green who was foolish to think that he could do something like that with the game on the line.