Sports games are a large blindspot for most video game historians – I admit it! When we look at the wide span of video game history, sports games only tend to get the briefest of mentions, especially after the early days. While there are many reasons for this, primarily I think it’s hard for some of us to parse how the gameplay innovations of early sports titles differ from providing a pure simulation, like non-civilian flight simulator. In a world where each major sport is dominated by a single franchise, the end result can seem inevitable rather than gradual. “If it’s in the game, it’s in the game.” Right?

But this view has always been reductive and misses out on the ways that sports games have often pushed the boundaries of gaming technology – plus influenced other genres in the process. Today we’ll do a brief examination of the golf game genre, a sport whose relationship with video games has been particularly interesting. We’ll look at several ways it innovated early game technology, spurred players to engage with the games in some diverse ways, and created one of the enduring UI elements unique to video games to boot.

Among major, popular sports across the world, golf is fairly unique: It’s not fundamentally a team sport, competing players do not generally influence each other, and the terrain is absolutely crucial to how each game plays out. This last element was a huge challenge for early takes on the sport. While designers did not have to worry about AI and counterplay as in sports like football and baseball, having varied landscapes was often an even greater challenge for 8-bit systems. Beyond that, how a player struck the ball and the physics thereof was half the point of the game – it couldn’t be fudged as in other sports.

One simple way of solving the terrain problem was to portray the game as mini-golf, which has generally flat and blocky courses. This worked well with the top-down perspective of most games at the time, allowing players to view a full course and work towards a single objective. However, perfect right angles are not conducive to interesting course traversal. These simple golf games were invariably hamstrung by their perspective and couldn’t truly embody the physics at play in real golf.

Pushing the boundaries of mono-screen golf games was no easy feat for those designers who attempted to fully feature the sport. It was easy enough to program differences in golf clubs and even on consoles it was simple to have balls move in more than the cardinal directions. However, interface was always an issue: particularly the golf swing. The swing seems like a perfect place to introduce an action element but that introduced a plethora of questions. Should the swing itself be a physical object like the player, as in Computer Golf! on the Odyssey2 and later Atari’s Golf? What about as an isolated action with several steps like PGA Golf on the Intellivision? Or should the swing be treated more like an artillery game with numerical inputs for all possible variables? Despite seeming simple, golf was not easy to boil down into a few elements of action as a sport.

The first steps in evolving the golf game first came from Japanese software houses. Tackling the interface problem, in 1981 Data East’s Pro Golf introduced the power bar. This innovative user interface element provided a method by which a character’s action could be predictably translated into player action. Using a linear graph split into segments, players could near-accurately determine what their ball would do in flight (taking into account all other variables, of course). While Pro Golf mostly determines aiming for the player and only has rudimentary barriers to keep the pace of play fast, the introduction of the power bar helped unlock so much statistical depth while reducing input complexity that it’s one of the greatest innovations in the history of digital games – adopted for a wide variety of uses outside of the sports sphere.

3-D Golf Simulation by T&E Soft on computer platforms was the next major step in bringing authenticity to the game. Of course most of the hardware of this era was ill-suited to any manner of 3D display. Utilizing some of the techniques of existing flight simulators, 3-D Golf Simulation rendered set angles of a golf course with flatly undulating 3D terrain. The path of the ball was traced on each swing, allowing a player to determine their current position and switching cameras as they reached new parts of the course. It also included the power bar, though with its level of freedom also came a good deal more informational complexity and requiring the angles to be set with each swing. The 3D space of 3-D Golf Simulation bid players to treat the golf course as a robust world with many facets, even if it was a very slow and laborious game on the whole.

Leave it to Nintendo – and HAL Laboratories – to bring package all the gold innovations together in a more appealing package. Golf (1984) for the Family Computer was among the most popular games for Nintendo’s console in both Japan and the U.S. Its iconic status can be explained by three particular refinements. Firstly, the game emphasized character with the maybe-Mario golfer taking up a significant portion of the screen – implying a 3D perspective without having to do any 3D rendering. Next was the pace of play, with each putt following almost immediately after the next. The clarity of the course design was likewise vital to the rhythm of the game, as were the touches that made it seem to have depth where there was none. Finally, Golf‘s chief innovation on the power bar, a three-step solution which accounted for not only strength but the slice of the ball’s direction without having to pre-position the golfer or swing.

Golf‘s smooth gameplay innovations helped it find an audience on both sides of the Pacific, despite the stereotype of golf being purely for older people. It was also one of Nintendo’s lead games featured as part of the coin-op VS System (which included a variant called Ladies Golf). However, the arcade of the mid-1980s was not frequented by the types of people who would want to be seen playing golf – even if they enjoyed playing the cartridge at home. Older audiences for games had shifted to computer platforms, where an arms race was on to create a true 3D golf game with all the bells and whistles of something like the Nintendo version.

Three projects in simultaneous development by American development groups sought to tackle the same issue: Projecting a 3D golf course into a two-dimensional image which would change every new swing – terrain differing per the position. In the middle of 1986, these games arrived on top of each other; two of them kickstarted decade-long franchises. The first was Leader Board for the Commodore 64 by Access Software in April 1986, predecessor of the Links series. Then Mean 18 was published in May 1986 for the IBM PC by Accolade Software, progenitor of the Jack Niklaus franchise. Last to the party was World Tour Golf by Electronic Arts in August 1986 for the IBM PC.

The shared commonality between these games are their behind-the-golfer perspective, static 3D rendering that takes into account all obstacles, and some form of a three-stage golf swing (what would later be called the “three click swing”). World Tour Golf is the odd one out with its implementation of a radial-based system, but all three have power and slice on a timing-based UI system which are not identical to Nintendo’s implementation.

How each team came to its own form of the swing is unclear. Creator of Mean 18 Rex Bradford is absolutely certain he did not see Nintendo’s game prior to making his own system, though he cannot recall what inspired him to use a similar bar with markers denoting strength and slice. However, while Bradford was working on Mean 18, he claims to have seen a 3D golf game in production when visiting Electronic Arts which made him accelerate his development process. He couldn’t confirm whether this was World Tour Golf – he remembered the game having a much more complicated control scheme rather than the final radial dial system. That all three 3D golf games of the time came to similar conclusions does make one wonder what might have been in the air.

At the time, Leader Board was the best reviewed – and a real showpiece of psuedo-3D technology for the Commodore 64. Mean 18 and World Tour Golf as PC games played to a smaller market, plus looked significantly worse as many people still only used CGA cards with default monitors. Mean 18 was one of earliest games to use the composite mode of CGA, which allowed it to display many more (and more appealing) colors than typical CGA outputs. Bradford’s game also had another technical leg up as it featured actual sloped terrain rather than using a veneer of 3D on top of an entirely flat course.

These golf games also had something to help in their longevity: Additional course disks. This strategy of adding content to sports games was being exploited commercially by publishers to elongate the sale’s life of their line up – an early form of expansions or DLC. While Leader Board sold several content disks, the two PC games each had course creators, allowing anybody to create and save their own maps. This became a special appeal for for Mean 18 as it had a particularly well-done course editor inspired by the classic Pinball Construction Set. Accolade sold 100,000 units of the original game, benefitting both from official course disks and a robust user community sharing maps over both the sneakernet and bulletin board systems.

With a solid foundation of appealing golf gameplay established on computer platforms, the concept found further purchase in coin-op. Incredible Technologies’ Golden Tee Golf from 1989 brought graphical pizzazz to the 3D golf format with fast gameplay fit to the game’s location-based context. It also solved the issue of interface for golf swings in an ingenious way, utilizing the classic trackball controller pioneered in the late 1970s. As in its use on Capcom Bowling (a previous Incredible Technologies game) the trackball enabled both power and curve naturally in a way that even non-game players could understand. The approachable nature of Golden Tee Golf helped it find purchase in bars an restaurants – establishments which had not regularly hosted video games since the Golden Age of Arcade Video Games.

What really propelled Golden Tee Golf into legendary status though was its revival of another Golden Age concept: Competitive play. Using the power of the burgeoning internet, in 1995 Incredible Technologies and its distribution partners encouraged players across the U.S. to submit their best efforts in Peter Jacobsen’s Golden Tee 3D Golf to online leaderboards in nationwide tournaments. Mean 18 had been used to a similar purpose on an early networking service, but golf again proved a perfect testbed for the burgeoning technology of the Internet. As a game that didn’t need to be played simultaneously in real-time, Golden Tee 3D Golf helped to propel a new method of social play through a limited form of connectivity which is still maintained to this day.

Drilling down on a particular game genre helps illuminate larger trends in the industry, plus how different ecosystems help shape games within that genre. There’s plenty more to be said on the refinement of golf games, but in these examples I hope I’ve highlighted the ways in which this ‘boring’ sport influenced the wider gaming world. Whether it’s the many forms of the power bar which found its way to and then out of sports games, some of the first steps in creating 3D worlds as we know them, early modding communities, or competitive ranking over the internet. No genre is an island and no video game developer could miss the impact golf games have had.