The console crowd debated between swigs of Mountain Dew that PC gamers were crusty old farts who wouldn't know a fun game if it smacked them across the face with a gamepad. For console players, the entire point was controlling all of the action. Stats, franchise modes and editing capabilities didn't matter as long as they were controlling Barry Sanders.
By looking back at my history tree, you can probably guess which camp I fell into. I just didn't get the lure of console games. They were ugly, featureless games whose lone draw was that you could control the players a hell of a lot better than you could in most PC games.
I simply couldn't understand why someone would want to play Madden over Front Page Sports: Football. In Front Page Sports, my college roomies held rookie drafts, created custom teams with custom uniforms, designed plays - all with the ease of using a mouse and a keyboard. We felt like the game created its own little football universe. In Madden, you could control John Elway and throw for 600 yards game. It just wasn't for me.
Here's the problem, though: The console games were really, really popular, and PC sports games fell into the same yearly rut we see today. Front Page Sports died a slow, painful death thanks to upper management incompetence. Microsoft's short attempt to revitalize PC sports gaming faced a much quicker demise. Even EA Sports, who once made as big a deal of their PC releases as they did the console stuff, slowly began to siphon cash away from the computer. By the time the PS2 rolled out, the war was all but over. Today, PC sports gaming is limited to racing games and text-based games like Out of the Park Baseball and its ilk.
While console games sold a lot of units, the PC side of the genre didn't do itself any favors, either. PC sports gaming's last throes were in the early 2000s with two baseball games: 3DO's High Heat Major League Baseball and EA's MVP Baseball. These were two excellent games - two of the best of all time, in fact - and are a lesson in why losing this platform as a viable sports gaming alternative has hurt consumers.
Take High Heat. The PC versions from 2000 through 2002 were brilliant, not only because of the designs, the true PC interface and the focus on realism combined with arcade play, but because of user and post-release support from 3DO. Out of the box, High Heat was a good but terribly buggy game. Like many of today's sports games, it wasn't complete. When you would download PC patches for popular sports games, you'd see a laundry list of fixes and enhancements, and while gamers bitched about needing patches, they'd be even more furious if they didn't get them.
