Play Sports Illustrated : Football Online

Sports Illustrated Football came out for the Game Boy in 1993, published by Malibu Games. It was one of the few football titles you could carry around in your pocket back then, a time when portable sports games were still figuring out how to shrink the experience down. You got a condensed version of the sport, stripped of the spectacle but full of that direct, hands-on control the Game Boy was known for.

You control the quarterback on offense, picking from a small set of plays before the snap. Your main job is to complete passes or hand the ball off to avoid the defense, moving the ball downfield screen by screen. The mechanics are straightforward: you aim your pass with a cursor and hope your receiver catches it before a defender does. On defense, you just try to guess the opponent's play and make the tackle. The game moves quickly, and the difficulty comes from the tight windows for passing and the aggressive computer defenders. It feels like a scrappy, back-and-forth struggle where every first down is a genuine achievement.