20 Years Later, The Fun Of NFL Street 2 Still Hasn't Been Topped
No kickoffs, no extra-point field goals, no penalties — just fun.
Some of my earliest gaming memories are playing EA’s Madden NFL with my grandpa on the PlayStation 2. Through these video games in the early 2000s, I first grasped the ins and outs of real-life sports, preparing me for the schoolyard and pick-up games at the park a few years later. These games could be a little rough for newcomers, as they often demanded players to learn the nitty-gritty of the latest mechanic added any given year. But they were mostly fun, emulating what the pros must feel in the heat of competition.
In January 2004 however, EA Sports turned its most popular sports game on its head. Published under the EA Sports BIG label, NFL Street was all the fun of the Madden series, with streamlined rules, crunchier tackles, gravity-defying evades, and virtually no friction to get in the way of the fun. Like its other Street games, the first NFL Street was a critical success. How did it follow up on that success? Just short of a year later, NFL Street 2 was released — and it more than delivered.
In short, the sequel was more of what players and critics loved. This was still a seven-on-seven game focused entirely on passing and running. There were no kickoffs or extra-point field goals. This was a game about insane passes and cross-ups you’d never see on TV and taunting your opponents with hilarious runs.
What was new was the ability to use the arena to your advantage. With games taking place in parks and backlots, out-of-bounds could be marked by fences or walls. To avoid getting pushed into them (thereby ending the play), players running the ball could run along or jump off the wall to avoid tackles, as long as they have enough turbo. Quarterbacks could also use walls for leverage to avoid a sack or get extra height on a pass. These moves added a ton of depth and options to the offensive play.
On the defensive side, the new “Gamebreaker 2” gave teams the option to force a turnover that 99 percent of the time resulted in a touchdown. It was definitively a less interesting addition, but a fair one considering all of the options that offense now had. Nitpicks aside, NFL Street 2 was a perfect sequel to an already fun original.
The Jam Effect
As a concept, NFL Street 2 and its predecessor weren’t totally new ideas. NBA Jam series first introduced the concept of an exaggerated sports experience that anyone could play competently in seconds. Jam’s football counterpart NFL Blitz would do the same to hilarious results. But NFL Street had specifically taken America’s game and turned it into something that appealed to everyone with all of the sensibilities of the 2000s. It had a banger soundtrack featuring the likes of Xzibit, the Ying Yang Twins, M.O.P., and Sum 41.
Receivers could jump off walls to make daring, game-changing catches.
At a time when the NFL was distancing itself from letting players have big personalities and getting into shenanigans off the field (for better and for worse), there was a novelty in seeing your favorite athletes wearing contemporary fashion and talking trash. It was a worthwhile riff on the ultra-serious presentation of the NFL, bolstered further by how fun and approachable it was to play with friends.
The biggest bummer about NFL Street 2 is that the fun didn’t last. Like NBA Street, SSX, and the Def Jam fighters, nearly all of the successful EA Sports BIG franchises ended within the first few years of the PS3/Xbox 360 generation. A generation without alternative sports games focused entirely on pick-up-and-play fun gave way to what we have now. Virtual pigskin has been stuck in the mud for well over a decade, ever since Madden became the only football game in town. It's not that those games are irredeemable. But for the more casual football fan who doesn’t want anything to do with the microtransaction-riddled modes or the growing pains of switching to a new engine, they’ve had to resign from the genre altogether.
Slocap’s Rematch looks like a continuation of what made arcade sports games of the 2000s like NFL Street so memorable
Don’t Call It A Comeback
It doesn’t mean the legacy of NFL Street 2 has been totally forgotten. Over the years, there have been attempts to revive what NFL Street 2 and other casual sports games did so well. NBA Jam had an excellent but short-lived comeback in 2013. 2K Games’ Playgrounds and Battlegrounds series have made for decent casual alternatives to the company’s simulation games. On the indie scene, lesser-known games like Sunday Rivals have helped keep the spirit alive as well.
Most recently, Sifu developer Sloclap revealed its next game is a multiplayer soccer game focused on the fun of teamwork as opposed to the dogged realism of EA’s annual FC franchise.
A return of the arcade sports game has been long overdue. In many ways, NFL Street 2 is representative of what the genre could be beyond replicating what millions of people watch on TV. It was an inviting, culturally relevant, and mechanically fun party game worth playing with friends and family. And modern gaming would be better if more games like it still existed today.
