XP Arcade: 10-Yard Fight

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

When you think of Irem and the arcades, your mind probably goes to the likes of Moon Patrol, Kung-Fu Master, and, of course, R-Type. In 1983, however, they tried their hand at American football with what was, arguably, the most advanced game of its kind yet: 10-Yard Fight. Originally developed for arcades and only later ported to the NES as a launch title for the system, 10-Yard Fight was a massive leap forward in visual quality for football games, which in that era existed on the Atari VCS and Mattel’s Intellivision, with the kind of colorful — but ill-defined — sprites that you know from those systems.

10-Yard Fight, though, had more detailed sprites with what were obviously helmets and uniforms on, far more of those sprites on screen — not 22 of them yet, but 18, which was a massive leap forward from the 5-on-5 NFL Football and RealSports Football from Intellivision and Atari, respectively — and had you fully controlling the action in a way that Stern Electronics’ Goal to Go, a LaserDisc football game in arcades that had you perform quick-time events during footage of amateur football teams facing off, did not.

You couldn’t choose from a number of plays in the way you could in Intellivision’s NFL Football — simply named “Football” once the license ran out — but you still had variety to work with in 10-Yard Fight. You could make lateral passes in the backfield to running backs on your left or your right, depending on which direction you were pressing in, and that served, plus the option to just take the ball and run while controlling your quarterback, made up your running game. Or, you could pass to a single receiver making his way downfield, which was more difficult to pull off but with obvious benefits if you could manage to keep from having your passes intercepted. It was a difficult enough maneuver to pull off, comparatively, that you received a significant point bonus simply for completing a pass even if you didn’t pick up additional yards after the catch.

While critics were understandably wowed by the level of visual detail and the scope of the game, there were some complaints about how it wasn’t “real” football. And, to be fair, this was no football simulation: it was an arcade game, and designed with that audience in mind. You only played offense, not defense. It’s called 10-Yard Fight because achieving first downs is the only way to continue playing, and while that’s true in the NFL in the sense that you turn the ball over when you fail to pick up a first down in four attempts, here, the game simply ends. In addition, though, is the way the game’s clock works. You’re on your last drive of the half, and if you run out of time, even if you haven’t run out of downs, you will also turn the ball over and lose. However, successfully earning a first down will not just reset your downs, but also add time to the clock — progressively less depending on your difficulty level, with the starting time for your drive also reduced depending on how deep into the game you are, but you basically need to chain first downs together in order to have time to run another play.

Konami’s Super Basketball, released a year later and also in arcades, borrowed from this idea of a late-game drive to win, though, it was far harsher with regards to the clock since it made every possession that didn’t end with you scoring into some form of additional penalty to your time. Like how you can keep a drive going infinitely — or, until you finally score — so long as you keep picking up first downs in 10-Yard Fight, you could keep playing and playing until you finally were ahead in Super Basketball, so long as there was time remaining on the clock.

Super Basketball also borrowed the idea of progressively tougher foes to face off against that would play better defense and force you to adapt or lose, while naming them after various levels of play in the sport. You start off in 10-Yard Fight against a high school team and play two halves, assuming you score in the first one. Then you move on to college, then the pros, then the playoffs, and finally you end up in the Super Bowl. That’s not quite how things work in football, sure, but at least it’s an understandable progression that reflects the levels that exist in reality, with two levels of amateurism, and a playoff team being a tougher opponent than any old pro team, and the toughest opponent being the one that made it to the Super Bowl to take you on.

If you don’t understand how 10-Yard Fight’s defenders work, you aren’t going to last long enough to reach the Super Bowl. Or even to defeat the high school squad, really. Press a button to snap the football from your center to your QB, and then take a beat to read the defense’s movements. If a defender has broken through your offensive line, you’re not going to want to make a forward pass if they are in the path of the ball, because they will, without question, intercept it. Unlike in actual football, the ball doesn’t turn over if this happens, but you do get sent 20 yards back. Depending on your skill level, that’s either a huge imposition that will make scoring difficult for you, or a way to farm additional points on your way to a touchdown. Yes, people let themselves be intercepted on purpose to give themselves more points, though you can also skip those risks and just let the time bonus on a TD pay off for you instead.

A defender breaking through isn’t the end of the world, though. You can draw them in with your QB as the above video shows, and as they commit to chasing you down, fire off a short lateral pass to a running back, who now has one fewer defensive player chasing after them. At least at first that’s the case, anyway: all of the defensive players move faster than you do, so you’re going to need to learn how to do three things: zig-zag back and forth, switching between running straight ahead and running at a diagonal — you move slower running diagonally, but so do the defenders, and you can put a different kind of space in between the two of you by doing this at the proper time — figure out the timing of players diving at you in order to not be where they are going to end up, avoiding a tackle in the process, and finally, learn to shed would-be tacklers.

You do that by wiggling the joystick (or D-pad on the NES) in order to shake a defender who has caught up to you — you would be amazed at how many more yards you can gain by having a defender drop off of you because they can’t hang on. And you will need every one of them, because of the scale of the field and the speed of these players. You might feel like you’ve gone 10 yards already, but until you get a sense of the pace of 10-Yard Fight, your instincts are wrong and you’ve gone more like five of them. Again, look at that video — see the distance between those hashmarks? You will feel the tension of each and every attempt at a first down even when the clock isn’t running low.

As you move up the ranks, you’re going to want to keep an open mind about forward passes. They were almost universally a no go against weaker competition because those defenders hang back, waiting on you a little bit. As defensive players begin to chase after your QB in the pocket more aggressively and in greater numbers, though, it opens up clear passing lanes — throw a strike to your receiver past the line of scrimmage at the same time that a bunch of defenders are diving right at your QB, and suddenly there’s wide-open field with no one around to chase your wideout down for a while. They’ll eventually catch up to you, sure, but every second they haven’t is one that brings you closer to another first down.

You will also have to figure out how to properly return a kick for additional yardage if you want to make life easier for yourself against more difficult opponents. A pro team kicks the ball a whole lot deeper than a high school team, for instance, which means you need to pick up more yards before you can score a touchdown. And you need to do that while the amount of time you have to score has also dropped. While you have 60 seconds in the first half of your game against the high school team, the kick will make it to the 30-yard line giving you 70 yards to travel, and the first defender isn’t going to show up until the 39-yard line, against pro teams those numbers drop to 25, 10, and 23. The Super Bowl opponent will kick the ball all the way to the 5-yard line, and you will have 10 seconds to score. Meaning, you need a first down on every single play, or, you need to be tackled so quickly that just a couple of seconds come off the clock, but you also will lose yardage if that happens.

All of this makes kick returns that much more important, because the clock doesn’t run during the return. Start on the 5-yard line, but you make it to the 30 or 40 or even the 50? You have just made your life significantly easier, since you now have to pull off far fewer first downs in a row in order to score. Notice in the above video how you have a formation of blockers around you as you return the kick: they do not make independent decisions to block, but instead follow whatever direction you’re pointing in. So you’re responsible for putting them in the way of the oncoming defenders, but you have to pull this off at the same time that you’re actively dodging the defenders who did break through and reached you, in order to extend the distance of your kick return. The rewards are obvious, however: that kick reached the 25-yard line, but the return, by way of using the blockers and shedding some tackles, reached the opponent’s 44. That’s nearly 30 yards gained right there, or, three first downs you don’t have to make, and all without any precious seconds ticking off the clock, either.

Sure, it isn’t exactly like football, but it’s not not football. And the fact that 10-Yard Fight was just the sixth or seventh football game ever, depending on the release date of the aforementioned Goal to Go, and had this level of strategy to it is impressive. Also, “just the sixth or seventh football game ever” is a count that includes Dartmouth College’s FTBALL from 1965 — for a system, DTSS, that is ancient enough that the BASIC programming language was designed for it — and the Magnavox Odyssey’s 1972 game, Football, which also used dice and playing cards in addition to the usual TV overlay with lights. It was still real early in the development of football video games, and 10-Yard Fight was the first true arcade-style game out there in the field. It was a huge accomplishment, and has a hook that makes it worth your time in the present, too. It might be simple in terms of what your options are, but let’s see how many quarters you would have had to feed a machine before you become Super Bowl champion.

Speaking of its run in arcades, 10-Yard Fight was a hit. It debuted as the top new table in January of 1984 by GameMachine’s accounting — the game released in Japanese arcades the month before — and hung out within the top three spots on the charts through the beginning of April, before slipping to ninth in the mid-month report. It would stick in the top 10 for a few more reports, though, before dropping to 16th in its final entry. Consider what arcade games released or continued dominating in 1984, though — Pole Position(s), The Tower of Druaga, Xevious was still hanging around the charts, a slew of Nintendo’s VS cabinets kept coming out — and realize that spending the first quarter of the year at or near the top of the charts in Japan was a significant accomplishment.

While 10-Yard Fight got its start in arcades, it would be ported to the NES as a launch title and even published by Nintendo. Irem still handled development, however, and adapted it for home play by adding a two-player mode that also allowed for defensive play. The play is a little faster than in the arcade mode, too, which makes completing the earlier levels easier, but the difficulty does ramp up in a noticeable fashion against the playoff and Super Bowl opponents. Pro isn’t a cakewalk, either, but you can get through that more easily in the NES port than in the arcade original.

For whatever reason — it’s licensing, but let’s keep it mysterious — the NES edition of 10-Yard Fight is not available on Nintendo Switch Online despite Nintendo’s other sports offerings being on the service. However, you can experience the original arcade edition on the Switch and Switch 2 thanks to Hamster’s Arcade Archives series. There, you’ll find the original edition of the game, as well as VS variant, High Score mode, and caravan mode where you try to score as many points as you can before time runs out. It’s not a football simulation, no, but it’s a perfect distillation of the game with a serious arcade hook to it, and over 40 years later it still sings when you escape trouble in the pocket and successfully complete a pass downfield.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.