NHL 94 Rewind needs a proper release for fans young and old.
For many a fan of the NHL, the release date of EA Sports’ latest iteration of their flagship hockey franchise is practically an international holiday.
Sure, the game is pretty much the same thing every year, with only the rosters and a few mechanics updated, but who wants to continue to slog away on the previous edition when all of your friends have moved on to the next big thing? I mean, think about it, a year ago, Panthers goalie Chris Driedger was an AHL player when last season opened up, and now he has the honor of having outperformed Sergei Bobrovsky from a statistical standpoint (more on that here).
In case you are wondering, Driedger has a ranking of 79 in NHL 21, a massive upgrade from his NHL 20 status.
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But this year’s edition of the game did have something new to set it apart from the typical re-skin fans of the franchise have come to expect: NHL 94 rewind.
The idea was simple; take the (near) universally acclaimed NHL ’94 video game from the Genesis, the Super Nintendo, the Sega CD, and the PC and port into onto the modern generation of consoles with updated controls and the current game’s roster.
See what I mean? Simple concept but boy was it cool; kind of like the Reverse Retro jerseys the NHL is using this season but in video game form.
Though some discredited the remake/reimagining for its lack of online play and general interactivity, but come on, this is NHL 94, but you can play as Auston Matthews, Evander Kane, and Travis Konecny. What could be cooler?
How about making the game available for anyone who’d like to play it?
That’s right, in a move as confusing as it is all too predictable for modern-day game developers, EA opted to make NHL 94 rewind a preorder exclusive and have no plans to sell it as a standalone game either physically or in various online shops like the Playstation Store or Steam.
So if you, like me, didn’t get around to pre-ordering a game that typically has no inherent pre-order value, you don’t get to see Connor McDavid pixelated like the Wayne Gretzky scene in Swingers or try to determine if the developers put in the effort to make a 16-bit version of Gritty.
Gosh, I want to see a 16-bit Gritty real, real bad.
Who knows, maybe this is all some weird, big play to drum up some online conversation before an official release is announced closer to the start of the 2020-21 regular season. Activision said they would never release a standalone copy of their Modern Warfare remaster when it was originally announced as a pack-in title alongside Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, but lo and behold, a few months later, both sat next to one another on shelves both physical and digital.
If that happens in this situation, then great, but if not, the NHL and EA Sports are missing out on a pretty serious market of nostalgia-obsessed who would love to fork over $10-20 for a chance to shoot, hit, and pass a collection of pixelated dudes on a pixellated ice rink. You may even be able to re-create that aforementioned scene from Swingers, though, since I don’t have the game, I can’t really say.