These names are remembered by sports and video game fans alike.
When people think about sports video games, they think about star players since there was an era where famous athletes in sports games were commonplace. If you go back far enough, any notable player would get a sports game associated with them.
This practice doesn’t happen nowadays but there are still sports games so closely tied with an athlete that we still think about them today. So here are five famous athletes in sports games – those whose names are practically synonymous with the sport they play.
Tony Hawk
It should come as no surprise that the undisputed king of professional skateboarding would be titleholder for the most popular skateboarding video game in the world. Anyone who grew up in the early 2000’s knew the Birdman, and therefore knew about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series.
Beloved by both skaters and gamers, the Pro Skater series expertly captured the spirit of skateboarding. It wasn’t just about pulling off stylish tricks, it was also about style and culture surrounding the sport. The Pro Skater series had that vibe, and is also probably why Tony Hawk is still one of the most recognizable athletes in sports games today.
Tiger Woods
In a similar vein, you can’t talk about golf without talking about Tiger Woods. As one of the greatest golfers of all time, he headlined EA Sports’ PGA Tour series of games for 14 years starting from 1999 to 2013. The series amassed roughly 771 million USD during this time but unfortunately hasn’t reached that similar high ever since.
Mike Tyson
This one’s a curious one because when we think about Mike Tyson’s influence in video games, we think about Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out. The classic Famicom game terrorized the late 1980s with its bizarrely brutal yet infinitely rewarding adaptation of professional boxing. And of course, your final opponent was Mike Tyson himself. To this day he remains one of the most infamous final bosses in video game history.
What makes this remarkable is that Nintendo only had the rights to use Mike Tyson’s name for three years. After dropping the license, Nintendo has since replaced Mike’s fighter with the fictional Mr. Dream in subsequent releases. The series has always been known as just Punch-Out but those three years left such an impression on everyone that it’s made Mike Tyson probably one of the most famous athletes in sports games of all time.
John Madden
While he was always a coach and not exactly a player, few can deny John Madden’s influence in American football. His presence was so strong that he even had a hand in the development of his titular game. He pushed developers EA for the game to have 11 players on both teams, an unheard of technical feat back in the 1980s, stating that “I’m not putting my name on it if it’s not real”.
Today, the Madden NFL series is still going strong. It’s one of the few, if only, sports games to still carry the name of a famous sports figure.
Michael Jordan
Last but not least is the GOAT of basketball himself who, rather surprisingly, doesn’t have that big of a presence compared to other athletes in sports games. Michael Jordan’s name was only really used in a few gimmicky basketball games in the 80s and 90s. His ‘breakout’, so to speak, was in 2010’s NBA 2K11. There he was the cover athlete and had a game mode based on his career achievements. It was such a big hit with fans that they had to bring Michael back as an alternate cover option for NBA 2K12, 2K16, and 2K23.
Banner Image from Anurag Sharma / Pexels / GameFAQs.