Football Fanatic

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Information - Football Fanatic

GenreSports - American FootballYear1983
ControlsJoystickPublisherSports Compu-Stat, Inc.
Players1 vs. 2CountryUSA
Programmer(s)Medium Cartridge
FormatNTSCRarity
DumpMISSINGSerial

Additional Comments - Football Fanatic

Richard Nespola and Jessie Kirsch from New York decided to take their love of video games and sports to the next level and formed the company Sports Compu-Stat, Inc. on June 6, 1983. They then started doing all the necessary preparations to launch an Atari 2600 game. With Nespola’s design, they hired a programmer to code the game. They negotiated a stand-by contract for the game to be manufactured in Taiwan. They drew up a marketing plan and did some preliminary advertising in the sports pages of The New York Daily News, Post, Times, and Sporting News. They investigated copyright law to make sure they wouldn’t run into problems with the NFL. But after spending about $40,000 getting everything in place, the lack of retailer interest and other job options helped them make the decision to pull the plug.

The game itself is unique in that it is not a straight football game simulation but is a two player trivia competition, where correct answers advance the onscreen football (named Fynyte) and whoever has scored the most in a 15 minute time period is the winner. Because of the limited amount of space available in a 2600 game, an onscreen code was used to refer to specific questions in a printed booklet. Although the initial booklet was more general, there were plans to market booklets that had trivia specific for each of the 28 NFL teams, extending the life of the game and appealing to team loyalty. As a follow up game, there were plans to do something similar with baseball, where correct answers would advance the runners and booklets for each team could be sold. The game is most probably lost.

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