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The Rise, Fall, Minor Re-Rise, Then Catastrophic Re-Fall of Electric Football
By Ben Holcomb on August 16th, 2012
We live in a time where ten year-olds think their lives are bullshit because the latest edition of Madden doesn’t have three-dimensional blades of grass or light reflecting off of players’ helmets. It’s not hard to comprehend why our economy has flushed down the toilet like a pet hamster you loved, but your mother didn’t. It’s easy to understand why people are strapping bombs to their chests and walking in to crowded markets. Our society is f***ed, and I think I know why.
On March 29th, 1925 a gift was given to the world; his name was Norman Anders Sas, and what he would end up doing with his life would be nothing short of mythical. Like all great legends, there are long periods of time in Norman’s life that go virtually undocumented, periods of time where the man seemed to just vanish off the map as if her were a specter. And just when his mother would start to worry, Sas would walk back into the world, a world hardly able to contain his brimming genius. Now I could draw comparisons to Sas and Jesus, who’s life between about 2 days to 27 is also full of speculation, but I’m not one to poke sticks at higher beings.
Born and raised a New York man, Norman Sas graduated from The Bronx School of Science in 1943, a school many call the “premier science magnet school1” in the United States. With an average SAT score of 2010, seven Nobel Prize winning physicists and six Pulitzer Prize winning alumni, it’s a safe bet to say walking around with that diploma in your pocket increases the “skip” in your step. Hell, the school was even home to Two & a Half Men downer Jon Cryer for sometime, so…there’s that. And as he walked out of his high school’s oaken doors on that fine day in 1943, little 18-year-old Norman Sas couldn’t possibly comprehend the ways in which he’d shape the world.
On March 29th, 1925 a gift was given to the world; his name was Norman Anders Sas.
You might find this hard to believe, but graduating high school in 1943 was not the best of times to be 18. Not to get pretentious and bombastic, but there was this major jerk over in Germany named Adolf Hitler, who had this mustache Michael Jordan would try to rock years later2, and he was just straight wrecking havoc on people in Europe. The world took notice, and Norman Sas enlisted in the United States Navy. There he went into oblivion like he was prone to, but low and behold a couple years passed and there Norman was graduating M.I.T. with degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Business Administration. GE took notice, and hired Sas to work on gas turbines and plastics straight out of college. Nobody knew it at the time, but Sas was using this as a front for an invention of his years down the line.
At the same time, The Tudor Metal Products Corporation was a burgeoning games company operating out of New York City under ownership of one Elmer Sas, father to one of America’s most unsung heroes. If there’s one thing the Sas family wasn’t good at, it might have been timing. As the depression came crashing down on America like a falling piano on a zany cartoon sidewalk, Elmer did what any rational human being would do: he started a toy company. And with their “Budget Bank” product Elmer’s company gave the proverbial middle finger to all things depressing, coasting through the thirties like “it ain’t nothing”. As the war ended and the forties came to a close, Elmer Sas called upon his son to leave GE and carry Tudor Metal Products to the promise land.
The prodigal son returned.
The Rise
At the time of his arrival, Tudor Metal Products (Soon to be named Tudor Games) had carved out a niche in the toy industry by creating racing games using crude forms of electric surfaces that buzzed, and thus moved set pieces. In some instances, father did not know better than son. What Elmer saw as innovative and groundbreaking, Norman just saw a bunch of fake horses twirling around in circles on an electrified piece of scrap metal. His company would have no time for inferior products. He was only 23 years old, but changes were coming down the line.
The value of the previous, archaic games was not zero, however; for they were the bedrock of inspiration for which one of God’s greatest gifts was bestowed upon humanity. Norman Sas described his view of his father’s inventions, “Watching these horses run, I thought, ‘Gee! If we could come up with some football figures and get them running against each other, we’d have a football game.”
“For 10 years we generated more money for NFL properties than anyone else,” Sas recalled.
In 1948 Electric Football was born; of course nobody knew anything about this thing until 1949, when it was officially rolled out for sale, but never mind that. The toy world was taken aback, and the electric football games couldn’t stay on the shelves. Parents around the country were annoyed into buying the product, if only so little Jimmy or Joey would shut up for two freaking seconds, that’s how popular the game was to the future leaders of our planet. Unfortunately, the game was also so fricking loud that parents buying Electric Football for their children for Christmas were sadly mistaken as the first buzzes came ringing from the basement and never…seemed…to stop. Never substantiated by statistics or research, I have heard more than one rumor that suicide rates rose among parents of boys’ ages 8-10 within the first 5 years of the product’s launch.
In 1962, the #600 model was rolled out, and kids across America were pissed at how out of date and shitty their old electric football games were. Thanks to the genius of Lee Payne, the game was completely revamped with players of greater detail and maneuverability, allowing players unprecedented forms of manipulation.
By 1967, the pinnacle of Electric Football was reached. A deal was made between Tudor Games and the NFL – the game had found its nirvana. With the backing of the National Football League’s logo, and fields and jerseys with all the NFL teams, electric football rocketed into a different stratosphere within the toy industry. Norman Sas had become a demigod to some 3. “For 10 years we generated more money for NFL properties than anyone else,” Sas recalled. 40 Million copies would be sold before it was all said and done.
There were competitors, yes, but none of them ever could reach the marketability and popularity of the original.
And then it all came crashing down.
The Fall
Sas wasn’t the best with predicting technological trends. Video games started to roll out, and people forgot about electric football as if it had meant nothing to them all along. To young children across this great nation, electric football had been the lurid affair they weren’t proud of, and Atari® turned out to be the girl they’d end up marrying, if only because society accepted it. The games got shelved, thrown into attics, and even tossed into the trash to make room for primitive video games and their 27-pound joystick controllers.
Electric Football was basically just one giant clusterf**k to the symphony of a flat-lining robot.
As video games rose in popularity, people started to notice the negatives of Electric Football that they never seemed to grasp in brighter days. The players never moved where you wanted them to go. It was basically just one giant clusterf**k to the symphony of a flat-lining robot. Don’t even try to attempt to convert a pass play; that’s just a forfeiture of downs right there. The running back you spent all your time modifying so he’d be a beast within the game? Yeah chances are he’s just going to run back negative twenty yards and run off the board, because he’s not sentient and he doesn’t give a single you-know-what.
And yet some still played, addicted to the rush of that one, ephemeral moment in which all the stars aligned and your quarterback took off for an 80 yard dash right through the line of defense, and all was right with the world. Sure, it happened maybe once every forty games, but the high was unlike anything ever created4.
Of course the word “some” can hardly compete with the word “millions”, and the video game industry exploded. Manufacturers and designers couldn’t even keep track of the innovations as they happened. Games were getting better and better every year. Electric football still just buzzed.
In the Eighties Sas sold his company to Miggle Toys and proceeded to retire to Vero Beach by the late 90’s.
Electric Football was dead.
The Minor Re-Rise
A funny thing happened, however. As video games transcended into a new dawn of technology with the invention of Playstation’s and Xboxes, kids started to have trouble relating to their beloved fathers, who let’s face it, seriously sucked at James Bond and Call of Duty. Conversations began to occur in almost every household from Seattle to Daytona. Young boys would ask their fathers what they did for fun when they were little, and the dads would look off into the middle distance and smile vaguely, remembering the joys of yesteryear5. Then they’d say to their children, “Pause the game, I need to show you something.”
A trip to the attic would commence, followed by an unveiling of a mysterious box covered in dust, moments of cleaning, and then the reveal: Electric Football was brought to a new generation. The novelty of the concept was captivating at first, if only because it was so kitschy and silly and different. But the game was undeniably fun, and father’s enjoyed reliving their pasts while still spending time with their kids. A minor renaissance occurred, the game replaced video games for some time, albeit for a short duration.
Furthermore, nostalgic weirdos aging men from all over started to play again, and years of quitting Electric Football “Cold Turkey” could not suppress the competitive spirit borne within the game. Grandfathers called grandfathers to come over for coffee and a game of electric football, fathers skipped poker night in lieu of an electric football tournament with some old college roommates. And, like everything else in life, some people took it way too far by creating the Miniature Football Coaches Association. Leagues sprung up in every major subset of the country. Lives and/or marriages were unquestionably ruined. The obsessive stage soon swallowed the cute-parent-child-bonding stage whole, and with that the minor re-rise was over.
The Catastrophic Re-Fall
People just stopped caring. Despite upgrades in player uniforms and improving the plastic with which figures were made, people couldn’t get over the relative lack of intuitiveness within the core of the game’s play. We live in a time where 3G internet pisses people off, a time where people go nuts because the handheld device in their hand, a device that has more technology than it took to put a man on the moon, is moving just a tad slower than usual. We have no time to watch helplessly as our buzzing figures run back into their own end zones as if nothing were sacred on this planet.
And hardly anything is any more. The video game industry has become one of the most lucrative our country knows. The Madden NFL video game series makes electric football look like a sarcophagus by comparison. Electric Football is long gone, and it’s never coming back.
Sure you can still buy it on Ebay, but you can also buy merchandise from original Elvis concerts; just because it’s out there doesn’t make it right.
Norman Sas died in June of this year. For that reason alone I’m convinced the Mayans were right. Although it might have just been a flash in the pan, Sas’ legacy will live on in the fact that every young man on this planet once felt warmth and joy and happiness from the game he created. No amount of shooting hookers or online warfare or pixelated football games can ever supplant those feelings that were created at some place and time on this planet. It’s a sad reality that the youth of our nation today hardly know what electric football is or was.
It’s not a leap to connect that failure to preserve what’s great in our society with the downfalls of civilization we’re experiencing. Electric football was one of, if not the greatest, inventions this country has ever seen. It’s a shame that hardly anyone recognizes that fact. Norman Sas was elected into the Miniature Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame soon after his passing, which coincidentally is the one Hall of Fame someone should be embarrassed to be a part of; luckily for Norman he wasn’t around to have a say in the decision. We as a people have a moral obligation to recognize the genius of visionaries whilst they are still in our presence. We did it with Steve Jobs. We dropped the ball with Norman Sas.
But hey, so did every one of his invented electric football players when you tried to pass it to them, so I guess it evens itself out.
Source? How about Wikipedia. ↩
But ultimately fail at…thanks in large part to this Hitler fella. ↩
Very few…maybe a half dozen or so…but there were some. ↩
Including that blue stuff by Walter White. ↩
And perhaps remembering that “one time on the 12th night of November 1954 when Joey Valentoni was over and he had beaten me seven straight times and was just talking so much junk I wanted to punch him, and then it happened. My running back broke free for two 80-yard touchdowns in a matter of minutes and Joey ran home crying to his mother. It was an Electric Football Miracle.” ↩
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