Monster (American) Football
Grandpa and grandson
Earlier in the month I posted about Grave Yardage, a DOS game I hadn't thought of for decades. I backhandedly asked how that game related to Blood Bowl and that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.
Blood Bowl
First, I explored Blood Bowl a bit. It was a British boardgame from 1986 that spoofed American football in the Warhammer universe. It was turn based and could be quite violent (in the theater of the mind, mostly). Players would use dice and ability cards to try and work the player with the ball into the end zone. It was fairly popular at the time, but seems to have hit a renewed interest. New versions of the game were released in 2016 and again in 2020. Outside of some rules clarifications and updated miniatures, they all seem fairly similar.
There were a few video game adapatation of Blood Bowl. A DOS version came out in 1995 that seemed to emulate the board game pretty faithfully. The game is turn based and seems to include all of the teams from the board game. In 2004 Cyanide Studio released Chaos League, a game that was so similar to Blood Bowl Games Workshop sued over it. Eventually Cyanide Studio got the rights to produce the licensed games of Blood Bowl and three have been released in the in last decade, to middling reviews. Blood Bowl 2 seems to be the best in the series.
Mutant League Football
Next comes the other monster football game people often think of, Mutant League Football for the Genesis. This game was published by EA, who already had a lock on football games with the incredibly popular Madden series. MLF came out in 1993 and I've seen conflicting reports about the engine that was used. The Wikipedia entry said it was based on the Madden '93 engine, but other reports seem to say it was a unique engine made for the game. Either way, it got pretty good reviews (EGM) and sold well. There was a hockey variant that came out and work started on a basketball game set in the same universe but it was ultimately cancelled.
The thing that strikes me is how similar MLF is to Grave Yardage. Of course there's the theming, but both are also real-time instead of turn-based like Blood Bowl. They also have a mechanic where there are fewer players on the field at each time (only 4 per team in Grave Yardage) with a larger roster on the sidelines. Players can be killed during the game and replaced with those extra roster members. A strategy in both games is to win by killing so many opposing players that the team has to forfeit, essentially winning the game regardless of the score. There are also intercuts where characters address the player after scoring or major plays. (This example from GiantBomb does not want to inline for some reason). And of course there are hazards, like mud, landmines, or even cliffs, strewn on field that players have to avoid.
From my last playthrough of Grave Yardage
Because they were so similar I assumed that one had to have influenced the other, but apparently not. In an interview quoted below, creator of MLF Michael Mendheim says the idea was his, a claim he's repeated in many other interviews as well.
Michael Mendheim: I’ve always loved football and monsters. My favorite team is the Chicago Bears also known as “the Monsters of the Midway” – Football and monsters. That’s a game I wanted to play, only one problem. It didn’t exist, so it had to be created. Back in 1991, I pitched this idea to one of my friends, Richard Robbins, who was a producer at Electronic Arts (he did the Desert Strike series). He liked the idea and set up a meeting to pitch the game to EA executives who made the product decisions. This included Trip Hawkins who was the founder and CEO of the company at the time. I spent a few weeks preparing a design and presentation, and then flew out to Redwood City. Trip and a majority of the executives liked the idea, and the project was approved with a modest budget.
I'm sure a professional video game creator, or a company like EA, couldn't possibly know every game ever created, but I'm surprised that a game like Grave Yardage, which was produced and released by Activision 4 years prior, flew under their radar. The similarities are so striking I would have bet that one influenced the other. To say a game with footballs and monsters didn't exist seems odd.
Regardless, Grave Yardage is free to play on Archive.org, there are three versions of Blood Bowl for PC circulating, and you can get copies of the newest MLF game, Mutant Football League (clever name change) for just a few bucks on Steam or GOG. So if you're interested in monsters playing American football, there are plenty of places to go.