Community Manager
My NHL journey started when I was 10-ish. A friend of mine had NHL 95 for the SNES, and it was my first NHL experience of NHL at all. Being from Sweden and with a hockey interest that was barely enough to care about the swedish leagues at the time, NHL 95 got me hooked on hockey! Within a Christmas or two, I had NHL 95 too. I remember grinding it so hard. Played almost a full season, leading the stats by a crazy margin... I simulated the rest of the season... only to find that my best scorer did not win. No, not only one, but several players had ALSO scored 200+ goals. Don't remember the scores of the games I simulated, but that was something I will never forget. I also remember how, frustrated with trades not going through, I just moved players I wanted through Free Agents to get who I wanted. I also remember creating a and "replacing" Denis Savard with a player called P(...) Savard, trying to convince my brother that it was his real name. 👿
Also had a lot of fun playing NHL 97 with my friends on SNES. Then I remember the PC versions coming. A friend had 96, 97 and 98, and we played those A LOT. I (or the family) didn't have a computer at the time, so we spent a lot of time at my friend's place, and I almost felt like I used him. 😞
NHL 99 was the first game I bought for PC, and it still has a lot of things I miss. The intro is as good as it get's and I feel like that's something that's been gone for too long. With today's possibilities, I'm sure excellent intros could be made with much less hazzle, and still be exciting and with great looking results. Sure, many just skip past them, but if you ask me "Intro or no intro?" I would always choose to have an intro that get's me pumped to play. Aaanyway, I also loved the mayhem. The number of times I've heard "Domi goes head to head against Manson" and stuff like that. It felt like the game was more emotional back then.
NHL 2000 was also great, and the intro is great. I still to this day love the song Push it by Garbage, thanks to this intro. I don't remember a whole lot of the gameplay, because I was still a young teen, there was no salary cap and I always had a stacked team... because that was how it was. There was not point having a "bad" player on the team.
NHL 2001 and remember because of the arrival of the icons, and not knowing how the X-factors will be in NHL 24, I hope it is somewhat simialar. Something I remember very well, speaking of those icons, was when I had a player like Mike Modano, who had the blade-icon and therefore shot really hard. When attacking down on the screen, it was often enough to cross the blue line, load a slapshot and the puck was in before the goal was even visible. But there was some odd satisfaction to that too. 🙌
After that, it is a bit of a blur, although I played all the games a lot. The next real noticable step on my NHL journey was when I bought NHL 08 for PC and realized that the skill stick and stuff I had looked forward to was not available there. I had to get a PS3, which of course I did! It's in the game... for PS3!
And from then on, it's been a bit up and down. Features and game modes have come and gone. The never ending request for GM Connected, which makes more sense now than it did almost 10 years ago (let's face it, it was there, but it was not great in NHL 14).
Maybe it's because I'm an offline player who enjoy Franchise Mode and Be a pro, and prefer realism to putting together a star filled team with players with skills that doesn't make sense (like the 99 OVR John Scott) and play with my Sean Monahan with 78 OVR against someone else's Sean Monahan who's a 88 because he has a card where he wears sunglasses (just making that up, but you get the point). I just feel like the online "money making" game modes get sooo much attention, while offline... well, we get some new feature, which usually feels rushed and if we're lucky, it get's attention and get's fixed, or it stays broken, ignored and in the end forgotten because it is not important enough to spend time and resources on. I hope the new team will be better in this regard, even if I from a business perspective understand that working more on the money making modes make sense when you want to make money(!). But still, there are a lot of us that are in it for the realism, with no-trade clauses, with deeper contract negotiations, with designing are own alternate jersey for an existing franchise... and the list goes on.
I wish I got a survey about the offline modes sometime, but instead I get asked if I will play more World of CHEL if my player can wear a bear suit (and no, I wouldn't...). As someone who even in the mid 2000's added my own RPG element to give my teams more depth, by rolling dices to check that the players were okay, if something happened off-ice or if someone requested a trade. It was even done in a way so that the less common things were less likely to appear on the dice (D20). Maybe 12 of 20 were "Everything is ok!" and then some meant there was off-ice issue or... I don't remember, but that was what I did. 🤓
And now, I've spent a loooot of time preparing for NHL 24, because I intend to make my own roster file. Usually it means checking stats, JFresh player cards, scouting reports and whatnot to make players more accurate with player type and skill. I feel like even in earlier versions, the coaches coach better when the players are more "themselves". When the player type is wrong and someone who's not good defensively still has high defensive awareness, because he is a "good" player... I'm not a fan, which is why I enjoy editing and making it better. 😳 🤓
I have recently thought about that it would be fun and interesting to be a part of making these games. Not sure what skills I would bring, but even if I was given a wardrobe sized office and told to edit all the players skating styles (and attend some meetings)... I would probably take that job! If it is one thing I have, it is passion for the game. 😃
I can't believe I've almost played these games for 30 years now. It's really like a relationship, overall I'm happy, even if there have been some rocky years, like 14-15, 20-21 and 21-22... in particular. But 22-23 has been way better and I have a good feeling about NHL 24. I guess my optimistic mindset and the couple counseling must have paid off! 🥳
My first contact with the NHL Gameseries was in 1999, when I was 11 yrs old, with NHL 2000 at my best friends house. I remember that his brother, him and me used to play seasons together, which where I found my favorite team (since then I'm a fan of the Dallas Stars), as it was the first team I chose. So I kinda got addicted to the game and bought it every year since then.
I have to say that I preferred it on PC, because there was so much things that you could do, like import your own songs, create as much players as you want and put them on maximum power 😃 and you could play with either the Keyboard or the Controller during the games. And back then the Intros were so much fun, with the real players skating to the camera and say that famous line "EA Sports, It's in the game.".
It was so much fun and I remember that Onetimers back then were already a thing and very easy to do 😃
