What’s the best WEIRD football video game ever?

Sports are dumb. Video games are also dumb. But dumb sports video games are the best. We’re on a quest to find the best video games for every sport that are also WEIRD and dumb. We did this because you all liked WEIRD Sports Games so much. So, you’re welcome?

I’m pretty passionate about sports video games, especially the weirder ones. That generally means not a lot of talk about more “recent” games, and more of a focus on a few console generations ago, when games were weirder. But there are a few gems in the weirdness column though, and we’ll talk about one of them today.

The two games this time around include one absolute classic and one game that allows you to rupture your scrotum. So, a pretty tight race.

Mutant League Football vs. Blitz: The League

There aren’t many weird football games because it is a very demanding sport to create in video game form. Even the first game in the Madden franchise was a technological nightmare for the simple fact that John Madden insisted on 11 vs. 11 play. Older football games that weren’t going for realism tended to pare down the number of players on the field.

Mutant League Football

If there is any series I wish blew up bigger than the rest, it would be the Mutant League series of games. Of course, there are only two of them — Mutant League Hockey and Mutant League Football — and both were excellent games for the Sega Genesis.

So, let’s talk about Mutant League Football.

Teams in Mutant League Football are composed of, you guessed it, mutants. There are superhumans, trolls, robots, skeletons, and aliens, all doing very violent battle in fairly standard football, at least on its surface.

The game plays a lot like the Madden games of the era, except in a post-apocalyptic world and with land mines, fire pits, altered gravity, invisibility, jet packs, referee murder. If you get killed, you fumble the ball. And if too many of your players are killed, well ... you have to forfeit. You can also bribe the referees to give the other team penalties. My favorite of those is when they levy a 5-yard penalty for “crying.”

Featuring players like Bones Jackson, K.T. Slayer, Joe Magician, and Scary Ice and teams like Darkstar Dragons, Psycho Slashers, Slaycity Slayers, Icebay Bashers, Vile Vulgars, and Sixty Whiners, the game really goes for its aesthetic in a great way, from the art design to quotes from your in-game coaches before and during games.

Blitz: The League

And now we get to Blitz: The League and its sequel, which I’m lumping together outside of the NFL Blitz series, because the latter had the NFL license while the former does not and the games differ greatly.

Blitz: The League is all about the problematic, dark underbelly of football, which is why the NFL wasn’t particularly fond of it. It didn’t have the NFL license, and featured several fake teams with fake players, very few of whom resembled real players.

Blitz: The League took the violence the series is known for and turned it up to 11. Injuring your opponent is a goal in both games, and the second one features some pretty graphic depictions of bones breaking, among other injuries. It’s 8-on-8 football, with no penalties or referees. Dirty hits are encouraged and happen when you charge a meter.

Whenever you get hurt, you can “treat” the injury normally, which leaves the player out, or you can “juice” the injury, which is just injecting the player with steroids to get them back into the game, where their chances of re-injury increase.

You can also rupture your scrotum. And it is indeed quite graphic.

Just going to repeat that: The GIF below is indeed quite graphic.

Just Lose It Films on YouTube

Blitz: The League features a story mode in which you try and win titles in all three divisions of the league. You earn money throughout, and you can use this money to buy equipment, training facilities, and drugs — both legal and illegal. You can also use some of it to send prostitutes to the hotel room of your upcoming opponents so that they’re drained on gameday.

The second game is a lot more of the first, but even more violent and dark. The thing that makes the games good, though, is that it’s pretty dang fun to play. It plays a lot like the Blitz series should, and you can have some pretty great games with friends.

There will always be a place in my heart for Mutant League Football, but I think we’ve got two great candidates for the best weird football game here. Now you decide which one it is.

[Hey, you made it to the bottom of a post about video games! ESPN Plus has stuff about that, too.]