A sports game is a computer or video game that simulates the playing of traditional sports. They are extremely popular, the genre including some of the best-selling games.

Almost every familiar sport has been recreated with a game, including baseball, association football, American football, boxing, wrestling, cricket, golf, basketball, ice hockey, tennis, bowling, rugby, hunting, fishing, etc.

Some games emphasize actually playing the sport (such as the Madden NFL series), while others emphasize the strategy behind the sport (such as Championship Manager). Others satirize the sport for comic effect (such as Arch Rivals). This genre has been popular throughout the history of video games and is extremely competitive, just like real-world sports.

A number of games series feature the names and characteristics of real teams and players, and are updated annually to reflect real-world changes.

The genre is not to be confused with electronic sports, which is used to describe computer and video games which are played as competitive sports.

History

main: History of computer and video games

Beginnings of sports games

Computer games prior to the late 1970s were primarily played on university mainframe computers under timesharing systems that supported multiple computer terminals on school campuses. The two dominant systems were the Digital Equipment PDP-10 and the Control Data Corp. PLATO System. These systems displayed no graphics, only text. In the early 1970s they printed the text on teletype machines and line printers, but by the mid-seventies the text printed on single-color CRT screens.

Highlights of this era in sports games include:

• Baseball (1971 — Written by Don Daglow at Pomona College, Baseball was the first computer baseball game, now recorded in the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. He continued to expand and refine Baseball throughout the 1970s, and its sabermetric approach provided the foundation for Daglow's later commercial games Intellivision World Series Baseball (1983, with Eddie Dombrower), Earl Weaver Baseball (1988, also with Dombrower), Tony La Russa Baseball (1991 through 1996) and Old Time Baseball (1995).

In the late 1970s arcade games began to appear, and sports were a popular genre. Highlights of this era include:

• The first racing game was Night Driver (1976).

• Atari Golf (1978),

1980s

Between 1980 and 1984 Atari and Intellivision waged a series of high-stakes TV advertising campaigns promoting their respective systems during the first round of console wars. Atari normally prevailed in arcade games and had a deeper installed base due to its lower price, while Mattel's Intellivision touted its visually superior sports games. Sports writer George Plimpton was featured in the Intellivision ads, which showed the parallel games side by side. Both Atari and Mattel fielded at least one game for baseball, American football, hockey, basketball, auto racing and association football.