This is so very true. I had an unhealthy obsession with NHL '94 on the Mega Drive. The Pittsburgh Penguins were pretty overpowered in that one.

Mutant League Football was another cool sports title that helped set EA apart as the edgy publisher back in the day. One thing I thought was cool was that in their early college football games on the OG Xbox they would actually say the names of your created players if their name was already part of the audio commentary library.

But you're absolutely right that EA managed to make bank doing annual releases with little to no changes (or adding a feature and then taking two away every other year). Other companies leveraged this and then it became a race for who could make the most derivative sports game each year.

At one point they were super money hungry, buying up studios, churning out corposlop for a quick buck and then shutting studios down if they weren't producing billion dollar output. But then they went woke, and started churning out corpo-tier wokeslop for the "modern audience", which was even worse than the standard corposlop.