There’s beauty — and complexity — in the simple.
That’s one of the many mantras, along with friendship and the legacy of the event’s founder, expressed this month at the annual Tecmo Bowl National Championship in west Omaha. After a decade, the tournament stands on solid ground thanks in large part to one man.
Brad Bell grew up in Fort Dodge, Iowa. He’s one of the original founders of the Tecmo Bowl tournament played each year in Omaha since it started in 2016.
Brad and his wife, Jeana, currently live in Papillion. Together they care for kids with developmental or intellectual disabilities. Between that large commitment and a full-time warehouse job, Brad filled his free time with one thing.
“When Brad proposed to me, he asked me if I would marry him and Tecmo Bowl,” Jeana said. “And I did say yes.”
Games are mostly played on an updated version of the original Nintendo console with HDMI hookups. People might wonder how many consoles, original or modified, the family owns.
“I would say, we probably have 40 at least,” Jeana said.
There were about six TVs active and running the game at the beginning of the double elimination round. About 20 players were competing in this year’s event held in early August at DJ’s Dugout.
Each competitor filled the room with chatter. Typically the young guard egged on the older players, who prefer playing it close to the vest.
They’ve moved venues a couple of times within the metro area, before settling on DJ’s Dugout in west Omaha. Brad’s best friend Nate Merz, whom he’s known since high school, joked about why they all love the new home of the national championship.
“They have the best nachos, and nachos are my favorite food,” Merz said. “So life right there, on planet Nate, is pretty solid.”
Ahead of a big semifinal matchup, Merz, or “Merzy” to his friends, said Tecmo having four offensive plays per team and four defensive counters makes it simple, but also complex.
“There’s still no better game on the planet than this game,” Merz said. “There’s just not. And it’s wild because this game has four plays, it has two buttons on the controller, and it’s just better. It’s awesome. I like to say that it’s so simple, it’s complex, right? The greatness of this game is that its simplicity makes it super complex.”
Basically, the improved graphics of today’s video games don’t automatically make for a better product, several competitors said. The limited options for teams and plays allowed the most enthusiastic players to dive deeply into the idiosyncrasies and quirks of the classic game.
“Tecmo Bowl is like chess,” current tournament organizer CJ Wallis said.
Captivating a generation
Tecmo Bowl is a two-dimensional video game released in 1989 on the Nintendo Entertainment System, commonly referred to as the original Nintendo. An estimated 1 million copies of the original game were sold, with the franchise selling more than 5 million cartridges across a number of different games, largely before the mid-1990s. Just 12 NFL teams were officially licensed for the game.
For many tournament competitors, nostalgia plays a huge role in the love of the game.
“When Tecmo Bowl came out in 1989, I was like 12 [years old], 12-and-a-half at the time,” Brad said. “At that time, those rosters were just a few years past when I first started watching the NFL.”
Previous games weren’t nearly as good, he said. Tecmo was one of the first video games to utilize real players and teams — breaking ground at the time.
“All of a sudden, you get this game where it’s like super smooth, fluid movements.” Brad said, “And then, you also had the NFL Players’ Association licensing, so you had the teams with their actual colors.”
Wracking his memory from childhood, he said the game came out just a few years after getting his first Nintendo.
“I had a Nintendo from probably 1986 on,” he said. “And I discovered Tecmo Bowl at a video game rental store. [It] probably would have been February or March of 1989, shortly after it was released.”
Things were never the same.
“Nate and I would get together, and we would play like six-hour stretches of Tecmo Bowl straight where you get in about 12 games,” Brad said.
In adulthood, Brad rediscovered the game following the murder of his friend Bryan Hansen in the early 2000s. The two friends loved to play Tecmo.
“He was a really good friend,” Brad said, “and that was one of my best memories as a child, was playing Tecmo Bowl,” Brad said.
After the tragic news, he reached out to new friends who shared their affinity for Tecmo Bowl. Eventually, Merz, Brad and two others who later moved on from the game, would hold an annual four-person tournament with the winner getting the Bryan Hansen trophy.
About 20 years after his friend’s death and nearly 40 years after getting the game, Brad looked back on his Tecmo career. He’s been to Tecmo tournaments all over, including big get-togethers in Madison and Green Bay, Wisconsin. The Madison event topped out at around 200 to 250 people in recent years, multiple gamers said.
Four years ago in Omaha, the biggest pool of players peaked at about 26. Brad estimates about 20 different states, along with the city of Toronto, have been represented. No matter the number of players, he’s confident his tournament is the de facto national title.
“I traveled around to eight or nine states in tournaments, this one always had the best players,” Brad said. “It was always the hardest to win.”
Merz added “this is by far the best. It’s always been the best. There’s a camaraderie here.”
That’s interesting, because Brad rarely lost. Just how dominant the caretaker and warehouse worker was at Tecmo Bowl is as simple as reading the history books. Yes, there’s a website that tracks each year’s top finishers and hosts the newly formed online league.
Getting bit by the Tecmo bug, which carries side effects like laser-focused dedication to one hobby, is transmitted through the air at this Omaha bar. And the tournament’s founder is patient zero.
“I think I won four of the first five,” he said of the Omaha tournament. He recalled that the biggest prize for first place was about $200. The top four or five players win at least their entry fee back, Brad said.
“Brad was so good,” said Merz, who explained people’s mindset going into the tournament. “It was really just like, ‘Is Brad going to win this thing or is somebody else going to accidentally knock him off?’”
Merz, no slouch himself, and Jeana would “train” Brad by testing different matchups and plays, leading up to the tournaments. And he never cuts corners. That’s just not the way he’s wired.
“I don’t want to be 75% or 80%. I want to be 100% or nothing,” Brad said.
His best friend would corroborate.
“My boy Brad would be running on his treadmill, like doing a workout, watching film of our old games,” Merz said, “I’m not even making this up, and like jotting down information. The notes he got from that are insane.”
The notes apparently paid off.
As for the hardware, the consoles are newer, due to a common issue with the original Nintendo. The pins intended to create a connection between console and game cartridge would go bad, causing the game to crash. But those 35-year-old cartridges were tanks.
“This is the actual original Tecmo Bowl, like the ones you would buy — the cartridges back in 1989,” Brad said. He later said, “I have probably over 20 Tecmo Bowl cartridges.”
The game with the NFL’s single-season rushing recordholder is the only option in this room.
“I always buy the ones with the black and gold seal, because that signifies that it’s the Eric Dickerson version,” Brad said. Dickerson had sued the company making the game for using his likeness without permission. He played for the Colts when the game was released, which is Brad’s favorite Tecmo Bowl team.
Everything people played on were his, outside of a few personal controllers people bring.
“You can find older flat screen TVs for next to nothing, or people give them away for free,” he said. He keeps them in a storage unit and brings them out once a year.
In short, the game reminds Brad of a golden era of the NFL and video games.
“We had it pretty good as kids,” Brad explained. In the 1980s, kids goofed around outside all day before dinner and sunset, then played video games all night, he said – “or watched the Cubs.”
The camaraderie and family
The level of dedication and domination from Brad led to a lot of pressure.
“It just, kind of, got to be too much, and I was really obsessed with winning and being the best,” Brad said. “Truth be told, I just kind of burned out on the whole thing.”
Winning no longer became fun. Brad clearly hates losing more than he likes winning: considering a “W” more of a relief than a joy.
“I finished with a record of, I believe it was 105-6. And honestly, the moments I think about are like the six games I lost,” he said.
Jeana agreed that Brad’s choice to step back helped him remember the important reasons he started the tournament.
Dan Slattery of Chicago, affectionately called DPS, is the world’s top-ranked player of Tecmo Super Bowl, a game that was released in 1991 as a sequel to the original. He said he was happy Brad returned.
“I’m glad that you’re here, though,” Slattery said. “Why are we in Omaha? For Brad. For this.”
Drew Alsip of Chandler, Oklahoma, is one of the commissioners of a new online league where people can play on their computers, using a USB adapter for the original controllers. He’s a senior at Oklahoma State University, majoring in computer and electrical engineering — making him one of the younger players competing in the tournament.
The slightly introverted Alsip described the tournament as “pretty dang awesome.”
“I don’t have too many friends, but I’ve got a nice community of people that I really love online, and it’s so special to meet up here and see them in person,” Alsip said.
Make no mistake, the crew doesn’t hold back on friends they see just once in early August.
“We talk some smack online, but obviously it’s much easier to do so in person.” Alsip said with a smile, adding that he’s mostly a reserved player.
It’s evident that hours upon hours of Tecmo Bowl created a special bond between Merzy and Brad. Merz said they’ve played thousands of games, with no way of being sure of the exact number. But only one result matters in the end.
“I’m thankful that the number one thing I’ve gotten out of playing Tecmo Bowl is my best friend,” Merz said. “I got to play this game for 30 years with my best friend. I got to play this game with my daughter. It doesn’t get much better than that. That’s about as special as it gets.”
Two of Merz’s four daughters have gotten hooked on Tecmo, too, with his daughter Sarah winning the consolation bracket about four years ago. Despite playing it cool when talking about winning and losing, Merz walked away with the tournament championship this year. He defeated the notorious personality, Jerry, who wore a Miami Dolphins Dan Marino jersey. While he played, he also wore a mask and sunglasses.
Current tournament organizer CJ Wallis, who drove up from New Orleans with his wife to compete, said the Omaha tournament is the best.
“We definitely have the best players in the world,” said Wallis, who’s originally from Vancouver.
He said Brad, who is the consensus greatest of all time, is “the reason Tecmo Bowl still exists in the world.”
“We drove here 16 hours to get to Omaha,” Wallis said. “That’s where Brad started it, and everybody’s sort of close to here. We’re trying to keep the memory of what Brad created alive as much as humanly possible.”
This is Wallis’ third year running the tournament, following in Brad’s footsteps. Soon, the filmmaker by trade will release a documentary on the tournament and its people. Entirely committing to the story, Wallis found a home with his Tecmo friends. What he found was an event and group of people united in a divided world, he said.
“The entire world is so fractioned and divisive with politics and all this stupid crap,” Wallis said. “This is a thing that’s remained untouched forever, and that’s a really beautiful thing. And I will never let anything infiltrate that or make this anything other than Tecmo Bowl and the friendships and people.”
With the torch passed to Wallis and the online league rolling along with Alsip, multiple people said Brad’s baby is in good hands. But he’s not going anywhere. The Tecmo legend still brings his consoles, games and TVs for everyone to use.
“As long as they want to keep doing this,” Brad said, “I’ll keep all the things in a storage shed. I’ll keep hauling it out here.”
Even with all the pressure and expectations that came with being the best Tecmo Bowl player around, Brad doesn’t regret a thing. The gamer said he got to travel across the country because of the 37-year-old video game and was featured in several podcasts and a Sports Illustrated article.
“If you have a passion for something that’s kind of unique, just go for it and do it,” he said.