Highlights
- Mutant Football and Blood Bowl take sports to violent extremes in fantastical settings, with races and creatures not seen in reality.
- Super Mario Strikers and Monday Night Combat offer unique, over-the-top sports experiences where rules are often bent or blatantly ignored.
- F-Zero and 100ft Robot Golf showcase absurd versions of traditional sports, featuring hazards and environments that would never exist in real life.
Video games and sports have an interesting relationship. They’re similar in that they are both games, and one could argue that sports are one of the earliest types of games humanity has played, making it a distant predecessor to video games.
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It comes around when sports started making it back to video games, meticulously recreated in digital form by sims like Madden, FIFA, and NBA 2K. These are not those games. These titles are what happens when sports are freed from the constraints of reality and allowed to get weird with it. These are the most unrealistic sports video games.
This series, composed of Mutant League Football and its spiritual successor by one of its original designers, Mutant Football League are similar to the real-world sport. That is, if the real-world sport took place in a world where every apocalypse happened all at once, creating a world of a variety of wastelands filled with a variety of human-adjacent creatures.
The original game, Mutant League Football, was published by Electronic Arts for the Sega Genesis. Its spritiual successor and its sequel are available on Steam.
Oh, and they still played football. The MFL is surprisingly similar to the NFL. The game is largely unchanged, save for the fact that the locales are far more dangerous, featuring sandworms, buzzsaws, and other hazards. It’s also much more violent, allowing for chainsaws, shotguns, and bombs to take the field, and bribing the ref can be done way more flagrantly. They still punish pass interference pretty harshly, though.
7 F-Zero
F-Zero is basically NASCAR hundreds of years in the future where instead of wheels, the vehicles are driven by anti-gravity units that allow them to hover off the track and reach ludicrous speeds. These races take place in exotic locales like in the skies or even other planets.
Speculative science aside, one element of F-Zero races doesn’t really ring true and that is the hazards on the track, mainly sections of road where the anti-grav tech works unreliably and parts of the track that are littered with landmines. Even now, with car racing having its long history, we don’t put racers and their vehicles in that kind of direct danger.
6 Super Mario Strikers
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Honestly, about any Mario Sports game is a contender for this list. Given the arcadey nature of those games, things can get a little zany. But the Strikers series of soccer– football if you’re not in the U.S.– games take it up to 11.
This is largely because of the incredibly powerful Super, Hyper, and Mega Strikes where you kick the ball so hard that they do things like catch fire, generate a tornado, and even split into multiple, validly-scoring balls. Also, there’s a lot of just flagrant rule violation vis a vis the use of hands, like when Bowser just stops, picks up the ball, and pitches it straight into the goal.
4 Monday Night Combat
Not based on a real-life sport, Monday Night Combat is presented as a future sport where teams of cloned athletes fight each other to the death in surprisingly bloodless combat that plays out with a mix of TF2’s shooting and class mechanics, and DotA’s lane, creep, and tower elements.
The game was followed by Super Monday Night Combat in 2012, which added new Pros and game modes and was on early example of a live service game. Its servers were shut down in 2018 because of a low player count and not complying with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation Mandate.
MNC is draped in many of the same finery as real-life sports: corporate sponsorship, player stat tracking, designated player roles, wise-cracking commentators, and more. There are many elements that are absurd in this game, and hopefully that people get so desensitized to murder that they’ll watch real people (even clones) kill each other on TV is one of them.
3 100ft Robot Golf
Just by its name, you can tell that 100ft Robot Golf is ridiculous, and boy does it live up to it by being about building-sized robots playing golf in all sorts of locales like snowy mountain ranges, the moon, and very occupied cities.
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That last one is a particular problem since the cities are shown explicitly to not be evacuated, even as the mecha start knocking buildings over. Who would sponsor such an obviously dangerous event? Also, if we have giant mecha technology, would it be more fun to make them fight each other?
2 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Series
The high-flying antics and technically impressive tricks of pro skateboarders are already hard to believe in real life, but in the Pro Skater series, the tricks get pretty wilder. Some moves like the Christ Air look impossible but have been done in real life.
However, other moves like The Jackass are decidedly less possible. This isn’t even counting guest character tricks like the Jango Jump Jet or the Dark Jedi Grind, where the lightsaber is the least impossible aspect of it.
1 Blood Bowl Series
Mutant Football League is NFL Blitz, but even more violent, whereas Blood Bowl hearkens back to its tabletop roots as a turn-based football game. Blood Bowl takes place in one of the Warhammer Fantasy universes where they settle their differences on the gridiron instead of the battlefield.
The tabletop version is still active and in print by Games Workshop as of 2024.
Teams are made of Orcs, Dwarves, Chaos Cultists, and other Warhammer mainstays. Games are bloody affairs where players are more liable to strike than they are to tackle, where a goblin can get thrown for a turnaround play, or get eaten by the QB.
