Under the premise that all of the industry’s history is worth preserving, mid-tier sports games destined for the used games rack are also worth digitally preserving. For developers QUByte Interactive, the defining mission statement is that we can grow the videogames industry through porting and preservation. The studio ports and lightly renovates classic games that could use a second life and perhaps didn’t even get much of a first run. Among their ports are 16-bit fighting, racing, and shmup games, and now a collection centralizing some of the sports games published by Accolade in the 1990s. Accolade Sports Collection is an admirable yet incomplete collection of those games.
What’s included in Accolade Sports Collection: retro baseball simulators Hardball! and Hardball! 2; the Olympic sports mini-games of The Games: Winter Challenge and The Games: Summer Challenge, and the street basketball game Hoops Shut Up and Jam!
What’s missing: the original branding of Barkley: Shut Up and Jam! (rebranded as Hoops in the recent Evercade port this is based on); Hardball! 3-6; the Jack Nicklaus Golf series (six games that helped Accolade break into the sports market and could form their own collection); and the Brett Hull Hockey games, that for this critic best showcase Accolade’s blend of mid-’90s realism and accessibility.
Hardball! & Hardball! 2
The original cover for Hardball! looks like very modern baseball erotica. These are not erotica games. Unfortunately they are baseball simulation games. The Hardball! games come closest to actual representation of a sport. Interesting in hindsight that within two releases, the model for sports games could have changed so much. Nothing less than the entire perspective and way the games are played has changed between the year separating Hardball! and Hardball! 2 and surely neither holds up but both are curious in a vacuum. If you want the best of baseball sims, you can play Out of the Park Baseball 2025, a wet dream for sports statisticians who prefer games as spreadsheets. Both games are exceeded and outclassed elsewhere but their implicit retro charm remains.
By Hardball! 2 the entire perspective has shifted from a very broadcast-friendly angle behind the pitcher to a more videogame-friendly perspective from behind the batter. Some mechanical complexities are ironed out — it’s much easier to read pitch placements and fielding assignments — while the management parts are further fleshed out. We can only dream of annualized sports games with any notable difference in them anymore.
The Games: Winter Challenge & The Games: Summer Challenge
Let’s get real: I dearly miss messy old Olympics videogames. I love the simple value proposition that goes like, here’s some janky representations of sports and none of them are very good but there are several of them to make up for it. None of this is even licensed, so it’s like there’s not even this commercial necessity for these to exist. Some folks at Accolade just made these Winter and Summer mini-game collections for the hell of it and I think that’s beautiful. Also, they allow you to enter ten players to switch on and off with, and it’s hard to really fathom any other plausible ten player local multiplayer games from the era. These are neat small packages where you’ll probably play each event once and be mostly satiated. It was deeply sad, I thought, that the last Olympics didn’t seem to receive much of any console videogame about them. There’s so much opportunity. Until someone makes the WarioWare of Olympic Games I’ve often dreamed of, I’ll be here waiting impatiently.
Hoops Shut Up and Jam!
That’s not Charles Barkley. Instead, there is an anonymous stand-in. That’s hilarious for at least two reasons.
Reason one: Genericizing a knock-off of NBA Jam makes it doubly generic, which nearly makes it unique.
Reason two: Barkley Shut Up and Jam! is the most notable and interesting game in the collection but not for what’s going on inside the code of the game. What’s so interesting is that the broad personality-based attitude of the game inspired a Japanese Role-Playing Game off-shoot that is itself a remarkable thing to exist.
Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden – Chapter One of the Hoopz Barkley Saga is a sequel not only to Shut Up and Jam but also Space Jam. It’s also shareware, meaning it’s free for anyone to go download and play on their computers right now, which would be the best takeaway from this collection, to go play that role-playing game. Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden – Chapter One of the Hoopz Barkley Saga is a very funny deconstruction of celebrity in the ‘90s basketball space and leaves us with the deflated basketball of an idea that perhaps, in this collection of unlicensed sports games of the past, this one game probably really needed its license.
Accolade Sports Collection may not reach the heights of Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden – Chapter One of the Hoopz Barkley Saga, but neither does any other game that isn’t Shaq-Fu: A Legend Reborn. If you’re in the market for mid-range Sega Genesis / Mega Drive sports games as either a curiosity or a reflection on your past, this small collection will suit your needs. It’s such a specific thing, so you’ll just want to know that it fulfills what you’re looking for, because not much else will, if this is what you want. Sure, the games do require more context — a more built-in sort of documentation about how it all fits together and was made would be helpful but that’s not the job. These are not remakes or remasters. These are ports of simple sports games and you can read some recreated manuals on the games, throw on some faux CRTV filters, or rewind them and they’re packaged together so they create a preserved history of Accolade’s non-licensed sports games. Whether you want them depends on whether that sort of preservation sounds like a valuable prospect.