Prior to his hip injury, Bo Jackson was possibly the greatest athlete ever to take part in American professional sports.  But even he could not compare to his digital counterpart in Tecmo Bowl for the Nintendo Entertainment System.  In fact, I would be willing to say that the digital Bo Jackson was, and is to this day, the most powerful video game character of all time.  Eat it, Mario.

Tecmo Bowl was released for the NES in 1989, and featured 12 teams, most of whom had two running plays and two passing plays.  The Los Angeles team split their running plays between Bo Jackson and Marcus Allen, mostly because 2 plays for Bo Jackson would have been unfair.  Jackson was by far the best player in the game and, over 20 years and 5 generations of game systems, he is better than any player in Madden or any other football game.

I spent many an hour playing Tecmo Bowl back in the day and Saturday’s broadcast of Bo Jackson’s 30 for 30 episode, You Don’t Know Bo, brought back memories of him running rough shod over the rest of the digital NFL.