WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - NHL Hockey '94

Publisher: EA Sports Developer: Electronic Arts / Mark Lesser Released: 1993

After the runaway success of Electronic Arts’ John Madden Football on the Genesis, development of a sequel was planned almost immediately. But EA was looking to expand - it had football covered, and had tackled basketball with Jordan vs Bird, as well as the NBA Playoffs series of games. The next sport to get the EA treatment would be hockey.

NHL Hockey was released in the second half of 1991 to resounding success, quickly followed-up by NHLPA Hockey ’93 the following year. But NHL Hockey ’94 was the real deal, widely considered to be the pinnacle of EA’s 16-bit hockey franchise. Even today you’ll find regular tournaments and roster updates for this 24 year old sports game.

The Sega CD version is more or less a port of the cartridge version released earlier in 1993. NHL ’94 brought a lot of improvements to the series. The welcome return of the NHL license meant players could once again play with real teams on ice adorned with the official logs of their favourite squads. The return of the NHLPA license meant that, when you took to the ice as back-to-back defending Stanley Cup Champions, the Pittsburgh Penguins, you were in direct control of superstars like Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr and Tom Barrasso.

Can you tell I’m a Penguins fan?

Actually, being in direct control of the goalie was another new feature in NHL ’94. As was the inclusion of the almighty one-timer, where a player could pass to a teammate in front of the net, and that teammate would let loose a slapshot the instant he had possession of the puck. If you’re a hockey fan, you realize just how important something like this is to the game.

I could go down a long list of new features, but the point is that this game made the previous two in the series feel like dress rehearsals. They were the pre-season, this was the Stanley Cup Finals.

The Sega CD version of NHL ’94 added to the game mostly in the audio/visual sense. A full-motion video intro, video clips of each team, a full-on team matchup by Ron Barr featuring his actual voice before each game, and an underlying, redbook recording of a big crowd in the arena intermingled with the game’s standard cheers and boos. Oh, and the organ music all sounds much better in this version.

Another bit that I believe was added for this version is a very complete set of stats for each player that you can explore during each game. It goes as far as what years they played for which squads, all the way down to the minor leagues.

Outside of this being, in my opinion, the ultimate version of NHL ’94, I didn’t realize until recently that it was quite an important release for EA and its relationship with the NHL. John Madden Football did not ship with any player names or official team names and logos. After all, the licensing money had gone to Madden himself. NHL Hockey marked a shift away from EA looking for a single celebrity endorsement, licensing the actual league itself. Of course, it was not able to license the NHLPA, so the first NHL on the Genesis did not feature real players.

However, during a pre-launch event of NHL Hockey held in Pittsburgh during the 1991 Stanley Cup finals was instrumental in shifting this policy. The story goes that someone playing the game managed to get Wayne Gretzky, the face of the NHL, into a fight. Then-NHL Commissioner John Ziegler was present, and was apparently furious that it was possible for anyone but enforcers to get into fights in the game - especially The Great One. Fighting in hockey was a controversial subject at that time (as it has been for decades), and so Ziegler demanded that fighting be taken out of the game or the NHL would end its affiliation with the series.

Unfortunately, the game was done and was already being produced for sale. It was too late to make a change. And so the first game launched the franchise and doomed it to a future without NHL endorsement.

The stars aligned for EA the following season, however, when the players had a falling out with the NHL and went on strike in April of 1992. EA, which had been stonewalled by the NHL Players Association the previous year, suddenly found in the NHLPA an ally. They were given the license with the express request to include fighting in the game. Thus, NHLPA ’93 featured real players, fighting, and no official team names or logos.

Why is all of this important? By 1993 the Sega CD and 3DO were on the market, and NHL Hockey producer Michael Brook knew that with the advent of the CD medium in games, his sports titles would eventually require video footage. Of course, as is the case with most sanctioning bodies, footage of NHL games is owned by the NHL itself. And thus, EA was forced to make peace with the NHL, or risk releasing multimedia versions of his hockey game without the “multimedia” bit.

So there you have it. The impending release of the Sega CD version of NHL ’94 was instrumental in EA and the NHL having to kiss and make up. The downside to this is that NHL ’94 does not feature fighting, though you can still make Wayne Gretzky’s head bleed (See: Swingers). The upside is that we’ve been blessed with a long-running series of mostly great NHL games over the past 24 years.

I want to make sure to give credit to Blake J. Harris’ fantastic article about the creation of NHL ’94 over at Read Only Memory. Most of the information in the past few paragraphs is lifted from that piece, which you should really go read.