6 Sports With No Good Video Game In Years
4. Boxing
Fight Night used to be yet another EA Sports staple, with five releases following the company’s original Knockout Kings series onto consoles between 2004 and 2011. Each garnered a solid if unspectacular reaction, with the final iteration, Fight Night Champion, boasting a proper story mode, something that is now relatively commonplace in the sports genre thanks to the likes of NBA 2K’s MyCareer and FIFA’s The Journey modes.
Though a big fight involving a combination of boxing’s biggest names, such as the bouts of Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury in the UK, can still attract a huge volume of media and public attention, boxing as a whole has lost a lot of its audience to mixed martial arts. There the presence of one dominant company (UFC) means that fans can regularly see contests between the world’s top fighters. Boxing, by contrast, is regulated by four different bodies that each recognise different champions, creating a confusing environment.
Perhaps this fall in popularity is why boxing has been ignored in the world of gaming for so long, as quite shockingly, there hasn’t been a major boxing game released since Fight Night’s quiet retirement 8 years ago.
As a result, nobody has been able to live out dream matches between the fighters of today and yesteryear, which was one of the main appeals of past games that gave us the likes of Tyson vs. Ali.