In a world where games can roughly simulate just about anything your mind can dream up, from farming and driving big rigs to performing surgery or commanding an army, there’s a number of subjects that are conspicuously absent. Until only a handful of years ago, gaming had been almost entirely a single player experience, with most multiplayer offerings focusing on direct competition. Occasionally we would get a unique offering like Contra, Double Dragon or Toejam and Earl that gave us a new way to experience multiplayer as a co-operative experience, but co-op games are largely a product of more recent technological advances in gaming.

But with those advances, where are the games that allow team sports play? I’m not going to try to say that co-operative sports games don’t exist, because they most certainly do. Even the first installments of Madden and NHL on the Genesis allowed for two-player team play, but we now have the capability to reproduce true position-accurate team sports play. For years we’ve had games that allow NBA, MLB, NHL, NFL, etc. fans to experience seasons and dynasties and training camps so why not that next step?

Imagine a baseball game where you and 8 friends hunker down at a position and stick there for a full game or a basketball game where you’d actually be responsible for executing defensive and offensive plans. While all the bells and whistles of modern gaming consoles have long allowed for strategy management, it’s usually heavily automated. If each player on the field is controlled by a real human rather than AI, then it’s truly your responsibility to make sure you’re playing with the rest of your team.

There are a few ways that this can be pulled off in-game. First of all, four players per console play needs to implemented, with the preferred method of connection being a number of networked consoles (either over the internet or LAN) that each sport only a single player. If your friends are anything like mine, you can expect that there would be a great deal of arguing over who plays which position, so there would need to be a few different ways to determine that.