PlayMaker Football is an American football

American football

American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...

 simulation

Simulation

Simulation is the imitation of some real thing available, state of affairs, or process. The act of simulating something generally entails representing certain key characteristics or behaviours of a selected physical or abstract system....

 produced by PlayMaker Software, Inc. The first version of the game was released in 1989

1989 in video gaming

-Notable releases:* October 3, Brøderbund releases the Prince of Persia game, the first in a series of games, noted for its advancements in animation....

 by Brøderbund

Brøderbund

Brøderbund Software, Inc. was an American maker of computer games, educational software and The Print Shop productivity tools. It was best known as the original creator and publisher of the popular Carmen Sandiego games. The company was founded in Eugene, Oregon, but moved to San Rafael,...

 for the Macintosh. It has since been ported to the Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 and Palm OS

Palm OS

Palm OS is a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants in 1996. Palm OS is designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provided with a suite of basic applications for personal information management...

 platforms. The most recent versions are 2.4 for the Macintosh and Palm OS platforms and 2.3 for the Microsoft Windows platform.

Summary

PlayMaker Football allows one to take the role of a coach of a team of 30 football players. The coach can create a team using the Team Draft mode of the program, and then design and test plays using the Chalkboard Editor mode. The Chalkboard Editor mode also allows the coach to create artificial intelligence settings for each play, used by the program to determine which play to call on each down of a game. The Game mode allows the coach to play games between two teams, each under the control of a coach or the computer.

PlayMaker Football spawned a small but dedicated community of players on online providers such as America Online and CompuServe

CompuServe

CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...

. This community is still around today, with several internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 sites available for coaches to join organized leagues.

PlayMaker Football 2.0 was released in 1996 for DOS

MS-DOS

MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...

 and Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

.

Reception

PlayMaker Football 2.1.4 was reviewed by mymac.com in 1997. The reviewers highlighted the realism, sound effects and the community of enthusiasts that were present online.

External links

• PlayMaker Software, Inc.
• PMFB.Net - a portal for the PlayMaker Football community, including several online leagues