“Self-praise is for losers. Be a winner. Stand for something. Always have class, and be humble.” –John Madden

10-Yard Fight was the first football console game that I played and was ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985. If you were to rank the football games on the NES, 10-Yard would probably be towards the bottom. At the time, though, the arcade version was reasonably successful, and the NES port had better gameplay and graphics compared to other console football games that were around. I am sure there are die hard Atari fans out there that might disagree and say that Realsports Football is a better representation of a real-life football game, though.

The 10-Yard manual shows off the controls. 

10-Yard Fight has 5 difficulty settings.:High School, College, Professional, Playoff, and Superbowl. Aside from the color of the jerseys the players wear, the difficulty settings don’t seem to affect the gameplay very much. I would typically have one of my code divers look into the actual differences in the difficulty, but 10-Yard Fight is so easy to beat on the Super Bowl setting it did not seem worth the effort. The only thing I can say is that the players might be slightly faster, and the AI might be slightly better at tackling and breaking tackles.

TIP: Playing the game on the highest difficulty setting is usually not required to consider the game “beat” in the NES community but in this case beating the game on the Super Bowl difficulty is the generally accepted win condition.

Once you beat the Super Bowl team, the game will take you to another match with a Super Bowl team and loop that way indefinitely. The manual graphic below explains the game and has a few interesting sections. It claims that there are 183 starting formations and as many as 133,407 plays.  The starting formations must be referring to the defense because the offense always lines up the same way on every play. As far as the 133, 407 plays go I cannot imagine how they came up with that number.

You should be able to beat the Super Bowl team on your first try with the information I am going to provide in this article. If not the first try, definitely every attempt after the first. In fact, the computer will likely never score on you at all because they almost always punt on third down and it is very easy to manipulate the player with the football.

You do not need to understand the rules of football to complete this game outside of a few basics which I am about to go over. When you have possession of the ball (offense) you have four downs (attempts) to gain positive yards (moving the ball closer to the goal). If you can gain ten yards in four or less attempts, you reset the number of attempts you have which is called a “first down”. You are attempting to get the ball into the end zone via a pass or having a player run the ball. When this happens, you are awarded six points, and you get a chance at an extra point by kicking a short field goal.

The field goal is very easy, and you will make it every time if you follow the instructions. When the opponent has the ball (defense) you are trying to tackle the player that has the ball as quickly as possible to prevent them from gaining yards. You can also force opposing players out of bounds instead of tackling them (which I will go over later) and intercept passes to gain possession of the ball.

The first thing that happens in a game of 10-Yard Fight is that the opponent will kick the ball off to you. This is probably the only time this will ever happen because the opponent will only kick the ball off to you after they score and like I mentioned earlier, they won’t. You can use this opportunity to set up a touchdown by placing your player with the ball against the left sideline and then using the surrounding blockers to engage the opposing defenders. If you can learn to do this consistently, you can start off the game with a free seven points and in the very rare cases the computer does score a field goal (3 points) or a touchdown, you can just run the ball back on the kickoff again for seven more free points. 

Offense

Passing the ball is NOT advised. The computer frequently intercepts. Instead, I recommend throwing a “lateral pass” to either the left or right depending on what your field positioning is. The defense will line up against you in many different patterns that are random, so there is no way to predict it.  The general plan is to hold onto the ball with the quarterback for a while until the defenders that are on the outside areas run towards your offensive line and hopefully get stuck. This will allow you to throw a lateral pass and have more room to run down the field for extra yards.

This doesn’t always work. Sometimes the outside defenders will break loose and tackle you very quickly. On the other hand, there are some cases where all of them get stuck and you can run the ball in for a touchdown. Most of the time you will get three or more yards if you run diagonally across the open side of the field. Since you have four chances to gain yardage, you can get a first down nearly every set of downs and then get into the end zone. 

This is part of the instruction manual that talks about “ACE-IN-THE-HOLE” and “the long bomb”. These are both terrible ideas. Like I mentioned earlier, passing is ill-advised at best because you cannot throw passes over the top of players like in more modern football games. There needs to be a totally clear path between the player who throws the ball and the receiver.  If the ball goes over top of a single opposing player, they will intercept the ball. Throwing a pass to a player that you can’t see while you are being chased by multiple defenders who are blocking your throwing path is probably the worst advice the game can give you. 

TIP: Do not hold down when you snap the ball, or you will enter field goal mode and lose possession of the ball.

Defense

Playing defense is pretty simple. You can choose either your A button defender or your B button defender. You should always choose the defender that is on the side with the most space because that is likely where the quarterback will move. Get your defender around the side of the offense where the quarterback is running. The computer will either throw to his outlet receiver on that side, throw to his wide receiver, or keep the ball. If you get around the defense, tackle the player who has the ball. If you can’t get around the defense because your defender is too far away, you can manipulate the player with the ball to run out of bounds. 

The strategies and information that I have provided in this article are all you need to beat 10-Yard Fight on NES.

A really fun thing I like to do with the game is see how big of a deficit I can get. In fact, on the high score tracking website Twin Galaxies there is a category just for that purpose. My personal best is 56-0 which is good for third place. The world record is 77-0 set by Andrew Gardikis in 2016. Andrew was consulted during the creation of The Easy Way guide and provided some very helpful information.

If you are looking for speedruns of this game, you might be disappointed. The fastest way to complete the game is to use the Famicon version because it contains a few glitches that are not present in the NES version.  The speedrun world record holder is… you probably guessed… Andrew Gardikis.

I hope this article has given you a taste of how robust and deeply I analyze these games when I am making a guide. I can’t wait to break apart the next game and demystify the difficulty of the notorious “Nintendo Hard” titles with you. If you are a NES Maniac like me, I bet you can’t wait either. 

Twin Galaxies Score Leaderboard

Speedrun WR

8-Bit Steve is a Detroit native, NES Speedrunner, High Score chaser, and published author, holding well over 100 NES world records and climbing to the top of the NES high score rankings. Along with writing four books in his series “The Easy Way” (Friday the 13th, Festers Quest, Jaws, Mike Tyson’s Punch-out!!), which focus on beating hard NES games as easily as possible. www.8bitsteve.com