Gridiron!

Gridiron! is a sports game in which one or two players act as the coach for an American football team, calling plays to direct the football players. The football field is viewed from a top-down perspective and the football players are represented on the field by colored dots. The statistics for players are provided on an NFL DataDisc.

Gridiron! was developed by Bethesda Softworks, a Maryland-based studio founded by Christopher Weaver in 1986. Weaver created the game with lead programmer Ed Fletcher—a colleague from Weaver's consulting company Media Technology—who suggested entering the video game market. A football game was chosen as an initial project due to Fletcher's knowledge and interest in the game.

Weaver lacked knowledge of the sport but had experience with physics and display interaction as a MIT science graduate. Production was "extremely frugal" according to Weaver, with development taking place from his home in Bethesda. Developing the tools and physics engine from scratch, the pair aimed to address the limitations of contemporary sports games' capabilities to simulate reality.

Gridiron! received generally positive reviews from critics. Writing for Computer Gaming World, Wyatt Lee wrote that the game's custom playbooks and teams provided the potential for "tremendous constructability" and the "statistics critical" design was not often observed in football simulation games. John Harrington of Games International considered the game to be an impressive mixture of strategy and arcade play.

Atari Explorer's Andy Eddy found the Atari title to be challenging and enjoyable with a "strategically accurate" design, commenting that while the minimal graphics assisted with seeing how formations and plays evolve, the graphics were not of a high standard. Ervin Bobo of Compute! noted the game's customisation abilities presented "options never before seen" in a football simulation, finding the simplified graphics was "no handicap" to the gameplay. Amiga World Magazine reviewer Bob Ryan commended the title as an "excellent physical simulation" and the "best game" played on the Amiga, although acknowledging the "simple but not crude" graphics.