NHL Rules

In 1993, while I was a freshman at an esteemed southern university, I spent quite a bit of time playing video and computer games -everything from Chuck Yeager's Air Combat to X-Men. The only game I wasted more time on than Wolfenstein was NHLPA Hockey 93. Nothing touched that game. Nothing.

For those that aren't familiar with hockey, it is originally a Canadian sport where a handful of players, on footwear known as ice skates, glide on frozen water with long, curved sticks and attempt to put a small black disc into a net. The NHL, also know as the National Hockey League, was the dominant professional hockey league in the world until the turn of the century, when the quality of play declined while player salaries increased. Labor issues and bad economics, of course, led to the infamous cancellation of the 2004-2005 season, killing the sport forever. The NHL has not been seen since.

But forget all that for a second. Back in 1993, NHLPA exploded on to the scene. The game was the quintessential hockey title at that point in time - even though it wasn't licensed by the NHL (NHLPA stands for NHL Players' Association, which did sign off on the game and allowed EA to use real players' names and numbers). It featured brutal checking moves that could knock players out of the game permanently and leave some lying on the ice in a pool of blood. Apparently, even the NHLPA felt the bloody carnage was too over the top and thus demanded that the fighting and blood-soaked injuries be removed for the next version of the game, NHL Hockey 94.

NHLPA 93

It didn't matter; NHLPA 93 delivered hours upon hours of competitive battles, trash talking and flaring tempers my freshman year. The game became legendary, as did Jeremy Roenick of the Chicago Blackhawks. For some inexplicable reason, Roenick's character in the game was simply unstoppable and whoever was lucky enough to land Chicago as his or her team could dominate the rest of the field. Roenick and NHLPA 93 were immortalized in a hilarious and dead-on accurate scene during the 1996 film "Swingers."

Later on, I ditched quite a bit of study time and even a few classes for NHL 95 (my friends and I pretty much skipped over the 94 version). The franchise had evolved to include complete seasons, player trades and gameplay enhancements like blocking shots and fake shots. Like its predecessors, the graphics were primitive and cartoonish. It didn't matter. The game was enormously enjoyable. And in retrospect, it's easy to see why those NHL games, especially the 93 version, were so popular at the time. The game was fast-paced, violent and easy to learn. There were no complicated and elaborate plays like in Madden NFL and other football games, nor were there lulls in between each play. The NHL games usually had lots of scoring (plus instant replay!) and some thunderous body checks.

Sadly, later versions of the franchise became focused on team-building, player creation and realistic graphics - everything but the bloody action and simple but effective game play that made the earlier versions so memorable (realizing this, I think, led EA to sneak in an updated version of NHL 94 in the PS2 version of NHL 06). I lost interest in NHL games after college, and since then, I've never looked back.