If you were excited to see 2K’s NFL video game comeback, you’re not going to like this story. According to Take-Two Interactive (via VGC), the upcoming NFL 2K arcade game won’t make it out in 2021 or even the early parts of 2022. Instead, players will have to wait a little while longer — until some point that has yet to be determined.
Take-Two’s president, Karl Slatoff, broke the bad news yesterday during an earnings call.
“While we are very excited to once again be working with the NFL and the NFLPA, our first title under new these partnerships is no longer expected to be released during fiscal year 2022,” Slatoff said.
As VGC noted in its report, that means we won’t see this title until April 2022 at the earliest. And what are the odds of an NFL football game dropping in the spring and not the fall? Probably not great.
As a gamer and a football fan, I’ve been really anticipating this release, as it’s been a while since we’ve had some solid NFL arcade action. I have what are probably some quirky opinions on the matter. My favorite sim football franchise remains NFL 2K, all these years later. But my favorite NFL arcade game is actually Madden NFL Arcade, released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 back in 2009.
Madden NFL Arcade was great because it wasn’t just crazy things happening that you couldn’t control — there was actually a lot of skill to it, even with the arcade elements. If 2K’s arcade take on football is more Madden NFL Arcade and less NFL Blitz, I’ll probably be more apt to play it. I’ve been hoping and praying for the former title to be swept up by the Xbox Backward Compatibility team, but seeing as that team stopped working on Xbox 360 games a while ago, I may be out of luck until 2K is back in the fold.
Hopefully we hear more about a potential release date sooner rather than later.
