Tecmo Super Bowl (1991) is the gold standard of NES sports games and, for a lot of people, the best football game ever made.

The thing that made it possible was paperwork. Tecmo held both the NFL license and the NFL Players Association license at the same time, which almost nobody managed before or since, so the cartridge has all 28 real teams and real named players with individually rated attributes. Before this, a football game gave you generic rosters or fictional cities. This one gave you the actual 1991 Buffalo Bills.

The season mode is what turned it into a hobby. It plays a full 16-game schedule, tracks passing yards, rushing yards, sacks, interceptions and touchdowns per player across the year, carries injuries that keep a starter out for weeks, and runs the playoffs to a Super Bowl. Battery-backed save, so your season waited for you. You could sit down in October and still be playing the same franchise in January.

The play system is four plays a side, picked simultaneously, and guessing your opponent's call correctly gives the defense a jump on the snap. That sounds thin and it is the reason the game stayed competitive for thirty years: it's a matching game with execution on top, so the mind games matter as much as the thumbs.

And then there was Bo Jackson. His speed and hitting power were rated so far above everyone else that a decent player could take the handoff, reverse field, outrun the entire defense to the far sideline and walk in, every single down. "Tecmo Bo" is a legend in his own right, and the fact that the real Bo's career ended that same season gives the whole thing a strange weight.

People still run Tecmo Super Bowl leagues, with hand-updated modern rosters. That's staying power.