Highlights
- Mutant Football and Blood Bowl take the sport to the extreme in imaginative settings with races and creatures that don’t actually exist.
- Super Mario Strikers and Monday Night Combat offer unique, over-the-top sports experiences where rules are often bent or blatantly ignored.
- F-Zero and 100ft Robot Golf feature absurd versions of traditional sports with dangers and environments that would never exist in real life.
Video games and sports have an interesting relationship. They are similar in that they are both games, and one could argue that sports is one of the earliest types of games that humanity has played, making it a distant predecessor to video games.
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That’s what happened when sports returned to video games and were meticulously recreated in digital form in simulations like Madden, FIFA, and NBA 2K. These are not those games. These titles are the result of sports being freed from the constraints of reality and allowed to go crazy with it. These are the most unrealistic sports video games.
This series, consisting of Mutant League Football and its spiritual successor from one of the original designers, Mutant Football League, resembles the real sport. That is, if the real sport took place in a world where all the apocalypses happened at the same time, creating a world with a variety of wastelands filled with human-like creatures.
The original game, Mutant League Football, was published by Electronic Arts for the Sega Genesis. Its spiritual successor and sequel are available on Steam.
Oh, and they still played football. The MFL is surprisingly similar to the NFL. The game is largely unchanged, except for the fact that the locations are much more dangerous, with sandworms, buzzsaws, and other hazards. It’s also much more violent, with chainsaws, shotguns, and bombs allowed on the field, and bribing the referee can be done much more blatantly. They still punish pass interference pretty harshly, though.
7 F-Zero
F-Zero is basically NASCAR hundreds of years in the future, where instead of wheels, the cars are powered by anti-gravity units that allow them to lift off the track and reach incredible speeds. These races take place in exotic locations, such as the sky or even other planets.
Speculative science aside, one element of F-Zero racing doesn’t really sound credible, and that’s the dangers on the track, particularly sections of road where the anti-gravity technology works unreliably and sections of track littered with landmines. Even today, when auto racing has a long history, we don’t put racers and their vehicles in such direct danger.
6 Super Mario Bros.
5 
Honestly, pretty much any Mario Sports game is a candidate for this list. Given the arcade nature of these games, it can get a little crazy. But the Strikers series of soccer games – Football if you’re not in the US – takes it up to 11.
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This is mainly due to the incredibly powerful Super, Hyper and Mega Shots, where you kick the ball so hard that it catches fire, creates a tornado and even splits into multiple balls that score points. There are also many blatant violations of the rules regarding the use of hands, such as when Bowser simply stops, picks up the ball and throws it straight into the goal.
4 Monday night fight
Monday Night Combat is not based on a real sport, but is presented as a sport of the future in which teams of cloned athletes fight each other in surprisingly bloodless battles to the death. Combat is carried out using a mix of shooting and class mechanics from TF2 and lane, creep and tower elements from DotA.
The game was followed by Super Monday Night Combat in 2012, which added new pros and game modes and was an early example of a live service game. Its servers were shut down in 2018 due to low player numbers and failure to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation mandate.
MNC has many of the same trappings as the real sport: corporate sponsorship, tracking of player stats, set player roles, witty commentators, and more. There are many absurd elements to this game, and hopefully people will become desensitized to murder enough to watch real people (even clones) kill each other on TV.
3 100 foot robot golf
The name alone tells you that 100ft Robot Golf is absolutely insane. And it lives up to that claim, because it’s about building-sized robots that play golf in all sorts of places, including snow-capped mountain ranges, the moon, and crowded cities.
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The latter is a particular problem, as the cities are explicitly not evacuated even when the mechas start knocking down buildings. Who would fund such an obviously dangerous event? And if we have massive mecha technology, would it be more entertaining to have them fight each other?
2 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series
The spectacular antics and technically impressive tricks of professional skateboarders are hard to believe in real life, but in the Pro Skater series the tricks get even wilder. Some moves, like the Christ Air, look impossible, but have been done in real life.
Other moves, however, like The Jackass, are decidedly less possible. That’s not even counting guest character tricks like the Jango Jump Jet or the Dark Jedi Grind, where the lightsaber is the least impossible aspect.
1 Blood Bowl series
Mutant Football League is NFL Blitz but more brutal, while Blood Bowl goes back to its tabletop roots as a turn-based football game. Blood Bowl is set in one of the Warhammer fantasy universes where conflicts are fought on the football field rather than the battlefield.
The tabletop version is still active and will be printed by Games Workshop from 2024.
Teams are made up of Orks, Dwarves, Chaos Cultists and other Warhammer staples, and games are bloody affairs where players punch rather than tackle, where a goblin can be thrown off for a turning point or eaten by the quarterback.
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