Joe Montana to Jerry Rice. 80-yard touchdown.
Joe Montana to Jerry Rice. 80-yard touchdown.
Joe Montana to… oh, come on. You remember as well as I do.
Punter Jeff Feagles re-signed with the New York Giants Thursday, meaning there’s still one active player left from the original Tecmo Super Bowl, released on NES in 1991. Feagles, 44 years old now, was in his third NFL season when the game came out.
I was eight.
Unless you’re very old or very young, you probably already know that Tecmo Super Bowl was an important part of plenty of young boys’ growing up. It regularly gets rated among the top 100 video games of all time, including as high as #22 by Jadedgamer.net. If I made a personal list, I have to imagine Tecmo Super Bowl would make my top 10.
It wasn’t the first football video game to use real NFL rosters (and neither was its predecessor, Tecmo Bowl), but the real team and player names sure helped to capture the imagination of every Hammer-pants-wearing 90′s boy.
The Tecmo franchise also pioneered the concept of a single player dominating the other team’s eleven, to the extent that he needs no teammates. Bo Jackson can score every time he touches the ball, for example. Lawrence Taylor can, and should, get 15+ sacks a game. And if you’re playing as Montana’s San Francisco 49ers or Dan Marino’s Miami Dolphins, you should be ashamed of anything less than 400 yards passing per game. You might not get the win with such a poor performance.
As recently as last season, there were three players still in the NFL from Tecmo Super Bowl. Junior Seau was active for seven games as a reserve linebacker for the New England Patriots, and placekicker John Carney miraculously got a Super Bowl ring with the New Orleans Saints—his first and only in a 20+ year career.
There’s still a chance one of these guys will re-sign and play this coming year (Seau seems to come out of the woodwork whenever Bill Belichick needs LB depth), but as of now it’s just Feagles.
Feagles also holds the NFL’s record, incidentally, for consecutive games played. If you thought that record was held by Brett Favre, you were both close and way, way off. Favre is second, having played in 287 straight games. Feagles has played in an unbelievable 352 consecutive games without missing a single one—literally every NFL game possible since Ronald Reagan was president.
On top of being Tecmo’s last man standing, Feagles is the only active player to have played in the NFL in the 1980′s. If Carney signs again, he’ll be the only other. Carney would also trump Feagles as the NFL’s oldest player, being almost two full years older—he turns a mind-bending 47 years old later this month.
It’s amazing. Feagles’ longevity—this will be his 23rd season—is remarkable, even for a punter. The boys that originally played Tecmo have pubesced, grown up, gone to college, gotten married, and now have children of their own.
At least I do.
Jeff Feagles, I salute you. Keep on puntin’.
I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what team Feagles played for in Tecmo. I knew it was a team that I played as often, but I couldn’t remember if that was the Eagles or the Raiders.
It’s the Eagles. I remember that for sure, because for a long time I thought it was one of the fake names. “QB Eagles” was Randall Cunningham, and it didn’t seem like a stretch that someone named Feagles playing for the Eagles was also fake.
carney is back!!!!!!!
I know, I can’t believe it. And still kicking game-winners, too.