The 2005 Tecmo Bowl Playoffs

Following the 2005 NFL season, I felt it was my duty to do something with the hours upon hours of playoff footage I recorded on my DVR. I had a crazy idea to take the highlights of each game and represent them in the style of the old NES game Tecmo Super Bowl.

There were a lot of elements from the actual game that I needed to use in the videos. The most critical of these were the sound effects and music. Luckily, the game has a hidden sound test screen where you can select and play any sound found in the game. (At the game title screen, press Left + B.) Using an emulator, I was able to build a library of all 60 sounds from the game by recording them to my computer one by one.

My idea was to create videos that looked like a person was starting up the game, flipping through the menu, and continuing their season play. The first step was to create the first few screens of the game. This included the Tecmo logo screen, the game title screen, and the game menu. I used a combination of Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere Pro to recreate and animate these screens.

The toughest part, or at least the most time-consuming part, was trying to find fonts that looked like the ones found in the game. After a day or two of searching, I finally came up with nearly identical fonts for the Tecmo logo, the "Super Bowl" title, the small, bold text, and the larger title text.

2005 Standings

The first video I made was the end of season standings sequence with the cool music that I seem to get stuck in my head a lot more that it probably should. This is basically the introduction to the playoffs, showcasing the standings in each division and ending with the playoff bracket.

Of course, since my favorite team is the Denver Broncos, I had to include the cut scene for them as division winners. I finished this video pretty quickly. It was fairly easy to assemble once I had all the elements, and I think it turned out great.

Little did I know that things were about to get a lot more challenging...

Download

View the video on YouTube.com. Or, download a DivX version:
High Quality [640x480, 12MB]
(Please right-click and choose "save as" to download.)

Next up, the Wild Card round...