Virtual Oil Part 1

By Avry Lewis-McDougall

As we all saw Connor McDavid was in contention for the NHL 17 cover but fell short in the semi finals with controversy surrounding the voting. It was kind of weird to not see him advance with literally all of his Team Canada teammates at the World Championships voting for him but the cover vote got me to thinking, it was cool to see an Oiler have a very good shot at being the first ever league wide present day Oiler on a cover and it got me to thinking about this team on a larger scale of things. They are a team I doubt that the average fan played as a ton growing up but the history of the team in the world of controller based hockey is pretty interesting.

Since the early 1990s the NHL or NHLPA has put out licensed video games, and that means that some form of the actual Edmonton Oilers have been in these games. Some games are iconic like the EA NHL series while some crashed and burned after only a couple of irritations like Fox Sports Hockey for the Playstation 1. Remember that? Ok never mind.

This project literally involved me loading up emulated games from back in the day on my laptop as well as firing up my PS2 and checking out the ratings on games like NHL Hitz, ESPN NHL Hockey, and the EA Sports titles.

(yes I actually still play these games and yes they are still in perfect working condition for my research for this piece, the layers of dust they were in actually may have preserved them).

So without further ado, lets actually see how various versions of the Orange/Copper and Blue have been in video game land.

The original rebuild Oilers

The Licensing came too late for the Oilers to have been a threat in the early days of the fully licensed video games so fans were most likely playing with guys like Todd Elik, Zdeno Ciger and Steve Kelly. These Oilers were a train wreck in the real world and for the most part in the Sega world they were awful to play as also.

For those of you old enough to remember this era of the Oilers, you probably miss the days of when a rebuild lasted less than 10 years.

NHLPA 93: Team rating of 4 out of 10. The highest rated player was Bill Ranford who was an 82 while no other goalie was over a 50. The highest rated skater was Joe Murphy. Craig Muni was the lowest rated player in not just the game but the series history with his rating of a 31. Yikes. Most of the roster was filled with guys under a rating of 60 as Scott Mellanby (55), Kevin Lowe (55) and Luke Richardson (53) were other notable members of the under 60 club.

If we could take away any silver lining of these games its that thank goodness Shawn Chambers wasn’t an Oiler during this time. He is the lowest rated player in ANY licensed sports video game. His rating while playing on the 1992-93 Tampa Bay Lightning? 1. Out of 100.

NHL 94: This game has long been considered one of the most iconic sports games of all time for all of it’s innovation such as penalty shots, reverse angle instant replay, and hey the Oilers were somewhat better in the game!

NHL 94 went to a best out of a 100 rating system for the teams and Edmonton had a team ranking of 67, better such squads than the Whalers, Devils, newly relocated Dallas Stars and the New York Islanders but with rosters built from the season before the fact that this edition of the Oilers which had missed the playoffs in 92-93 for the first time in franchise history was rated higher than the 91-92 squad that made the Conference finals for NHLPA 93 when you look at it is a little puzzling.

NHL Open Ice 2 on 2 Challenge: The now defunct Midway studios made a lot of sports games over their 3+ decades of operation before going bankrupt in 2009 and almost none of them obeyed traditional sports rules, this was the company that made NBA Jam after all and said “we can make a similar game for Hockey!”

I spent MANY quarters on this game in elementary and this was a game from the 90s that the Oilers were actually not too bad in thanks to Open Ice being a silly arcade style game in which you could literally set the opposing team’s net on fire.

As the game was played with just 2 skaters and a goalie the rosters were much smaller and the go to tandem of Doug Weight and Igor Kravchuk with Bill Ranford in net held their own. The game was released in 1996 and had the Arcade version was loaded with the 1995-96 NHL rosters. The Oilers in the final year of their first rebuild went 30-44-8. The game didn’t go with number ratings, but rather a meter bar to show how good a player was. Weight’s strength was passing, while Kravchuk was one of the stronger skaters in the game.

The Lunchpail Oilers

Ahhh the team from the late 90 and early 2000s, a far cry of the Oilers of the 80s that dominated the NHL but they would outwork you from the opening faceoff to the final buzzer. These Edmonton squads were never going to win a Cup but they were good for either slaying the giants or putting a big scare into the elite of the West and that’s the same for their polygonal counterparts.

NHL 98: Ron Low’s Oilers were one of the hardest working teams in the league and while they’d run into the brick walls that were the Dallas Stars and the Colorado Avalanche, they’d get some love from EA Sports, being ranked 13th in the league at even strength, 6th on the powerplay, 18th on the penalty kill and 16th in goaltending.

Jason Arnott would be the highest rated Oiler in the game with an 86. while Curtis Joseph’s 83 would make him the highest rated Oiler goalie.

NHL 2000: The EA team rating system over the years jumped all over the place and for the new millennium we were back to being on an overall scale of 1-100 for teams and the Oil would be 75 overall. Scoring wise they’d be given a rating of 81. Bill Guerin in this version leads the team on the consoles and in real life as he was just coming off a 30 goal season in 1998-99 while Rem Murray and Mike Grier also had 20+ goal seasons.

NHL 2001: One year later the Oilers would jump by almost 10 points for an 83 overall rating! The 99-00 Oilers were dumped in the first round once again by the Dallas Stars (to be honest I’m shocked that there wasn’t a “beat Edmonton with Dallas mode”) but improved on things by not going down in a sweep which was the case in 98-99. The only stat in the 70s with this version of the team was checking, nothing else was below 85 with offense being given a rating of 88. Doug Weight led the team in scoring in 99-00 with 72 points while Ryan Smyth put up a 28 goal season. This was also the year Alex Selivanov had a 27 goal year! I don’t remember him being that effective! Maybe because I was 6.

NHL Hitz Pro: In Midway’s final version of a wild and wacky arcade game for the start of the 2003-04 season the Oilers were a 78 overall, with rosters set from the 2002-03 campaign but with a smaller roster as the game only had three lines. Ryan Smyth, Mike Comrie, Mike York and Anson Carter were the offensive studs in this game as each had a 20+ goal year to deserve an offense rating of 81, while Tommy Salo’s 29 win year saw him get Edmonton a 79 overall rating in goaltending.

ESPN NHL Hockey 2K4: Many moons ago 2K put out a hockey game that battled EA and Midway for supremacy and 2K4 was one of the better games that the company put out. In regards to the Oilers they were a middle of the pack team, 17th overall, 18th when it came to offence the powerplay was 19th, but the blueline was actually 13th in the game. Jason Smith and Marc Andre Bergeron who both stepped up in 02-03 were shown some love. Or maybe Doug Lynch had a friend at 2K.

In part 2 I’ll look at the Oiler squads during their Cup run, the rebuilding franchises of the 2010s and their future in hockey gaming.