College Football: 5 Best college football video games of all time

College football video games are sorely missed. Here are the 5 best college football video games ever as we wait for their return some day.

As a youngster, the summer doldrums between when the NBA Finals ended and the college football season began were hard to bare. The only thing on television would be re-runs of The Real World or a mid-season MLB game. The greatest way to pass the summer until school, and football, started back up was the college football release which was on the second Tuesday of July for what felt like my entire lifetime (writers note: that didn’t start until the 2004 edition for the 2003 season).

The entire series started over at EA Sports with Bill Walsh College Football released in June of 1993 on the Sega. In 1994, EA released Bill Walsh College Football ’95 while Sega Sports released College Football’s National Championship. Where Walsh focused on a behind the center view the CFNC series was an over-the-top view. SEGA Sports’ College Football’s National Championship II was released in 1995 alongside EA’s College Football USA ’96. No longer was Bill Walsh at the forefront and the number of teams increased.

The first game to allow recruiting was EA’s NCAA Football ’98 which allowed the user to guide a program through four seasons of college football action and featured Florida’s Danny Wuerffel on the cover. Recruiting is the backbone of the college football video games and where EA’s design took over even in the face of the GameBreaker series released by Sony for PlayStation 1 in 1996.

As a massive fan of college football video games (I’ve even podcasted about them) I’m here to tell you what makes a great college football video game.