Electronic Football Helps Ease Withdrawal When Season Ends

Now that the Super Bowl is history, millions of football fans are harboring in their hearts a sense of loss that has little to do with the victory of the Dallas Cowboys over the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Football withdrawal, the painful realization that it’s all over until next September, is the malady. The afflicted seek a reprieve, a way to extend the season - and they turn to fantasy.

Never is a teenager’s Sega Genesis video-game system more in danger of being usurped by the adults in the house, because electronic football is nearly as much fun as the real thing. In fact, it is becoming so realistic that even some pros are hooked.

“We talk about video games in the locker room,” said Johnnie Morton, a Detroit Lions wide receiver. “To see the transition from the old days, when a game was two lines and a dot, to now, when they digitize actual human movement, is amazing.”

Fans of electronic football fall roughly into two camps: those who assume the role of player and those who prefer being coach. It used to be that players’ games were for young people who popped them into Nintendo or Sega video-game consoles and used push-button controllers to throw, pass, run or tackle. There was limited ability to substitute players, create teams or keep season records.

Coaches’ games used a keyboard and stressed strategy, statistics and history. After calling the plays, you sat back while the computer, with its minimal graphics ability, portrayed the action in a pokey fashion.

But that lineup is changing. Consoles like Sega Genesis have made room for statistics: Madden N.F.L. ‘96 (Electronic Arts, $65) even includes secret codes that allow you to play with 100 teams from the past.

Computer games are offering tempting “eye candy” along with some game play: In Unnecessary Roughness (Accolade, $50), you can control the action on the field while Jerry Markbreit, a National Football League referee, calls the penalties.

“The kids that played video games five years ago have grown up to play computers, so there is greater commonality all the time,” said Paul Sackman, director of sports marketing at Interplay, which has a new line of games, VR Sports, in the works for both computers and consoles.

Striving for greater realism, game makers have traditionally paid well to license NFL logos and players’ likenesses.

“That’s how I learned who all the NFL players were,” said Morton, who shunned television sports during his college years at the University of Southern California. “I didn’t know from Barry Sanders. I just knew that when I picked No. 20 in John Madden Football, nobody could tackle him.”

In the first versions of John Madden Football, the granddaddy of football video games and still the all-time best seller at 5 million copies, the athletes were pudgy pixels that waddled. That was in 1988. The game improved each season, and now the newer consoles offer images that approach television quality and a pace close to the real thing.

Last April, the makers of Madden Football, Electronic Arts, enlisted Morton and five other professional players to work with a highly accurate digital technique called motion capture. At Motion Capture Studios in San Francisco, a computer program called Biovision was used to record the precise limb and joint movements of the athletes in motion. They donned bodysuits with reflective markers attached to their joints. Six video cameras, all synchronized and shooting from various angles, captured their movements as the men jumped for catches and danced in the end zone.

By the end of the day, Electronic Arts was supplied with 3-D skeletal movements that could be covered with the face, skin tone and uniform of any player in the NFL. It was the beginning of a library of realistic moves that will make their debut on the Sony Play Station platform later this year as Madden N.F.L. 97.

“When kids play as Emmitt Smith or Walter Payton, they will actually be playing as me,” said Jamal Anderson, a running back for the Atlanta Falcons and one of the models.

The industry is in “a major transition from flat characters to real 3-D,” said Wes Trager, the vice president in charge of engineering and advanced technology at Acclaim, a major video game developer.

“This kind of thing was never possible on the old game platforms,” he said.

Sony Play Station and Sega Saturn are the hottest new video-game systems; the leader in football games is Sony’s N.F.L. Gameday ($55). Steve Bono, quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs, helped write the playbook. Although the game has a way to go in developing complexity and richness of visual detail, it is fast moving and exhilarating.

N.F.L. Quarterback Club ‘96 (Acclaim, $60), which is filled with signature plays from famous quarterbacks, has been upgraded for Sega Saturn after success on earlier machines. Madden Football and Prime Time (Sega Sports, $70) still rule the roost on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo systems.

On the computer side, N.F.L. Pro League Football (IBM Multimedia, $42) caters to the time-traveling player who is “interested in pitting the ‘85 Bears against the ‘93 Cowboys,” said E. Lloyd Webber, an associate producer for the company.

And trying to part a connoisseur of football’s fine points from Front Page Sports: Pro Football ‘96 (Sierra On-Line, $55) and its 200-page manual is like peeling a cornerback from his wide receiver.