Overview
NFL Football, not to be confused with the 1979 Mattel, 1989 LJN, or 1990 Konami games of the same name, is a full-motion video football game developed and released by Bally-Midway for arcades in 1983.
One of the earliest games to make use of the National Football League license, NFL Football puts players in control of an American football match between the San Diego Chargers and Los Angeles Raiders. The game is known for its use of an analog video disc player (similar to LaserDisc games like Dragon's Lair, but using Capacitance Electronic Discs) to show each play in action (recorded from real matches between the two teams).
As a FMV "cinematic game", the gameplay consists of players choosing from up to five different options for Offense and Defense strategies, with the result being shown as a cutscene. Players can opt to use a limited-use "StarSub" to increase their chance of success on a play.
The dedicated arcade machine is known for its controls, which uses halves of a replica football to hide each player's controls from their opponent (including five choice buttons and one StarSub button), and for being the first game (according to the flyer) to be equipped with a dollar bill acceptor. Additional CED discs and ROM chips with additional team rivalries were released, although full details of this is unknown.
The game received a very rare home conversion as one of two games released for the RDI Halcyon system in early 1985 (the other being Thayer's Quest). Based on the original release's Chargers/Raiders match-up, this game ignores several of the arcade version's UI in favor of the platform's voice recognition and speech synthesizer, as well as the keyboard overlay. Unlike the arcade version, players take turn picking their offensive and defensive plays. Instead of CED, it used LaserDisc.
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