If you're an NFL fan in your mid to late twenties, chances are you pissed away countless hours of you life playing Tecmo Bowl or it's successor, Tecmo Super Bowl. While the graphics and game play were highly suspect, the game had one feature that made it stand above the competition: STATS. 

The desire to accrue realistic full-season statistics would fuel me to play 8 games on a Friday night, 8 games Saturday evening and play the post-season Sunday morning before the "real" games started. Yes, I am aware of  how sad and pathetic that schedule seems in retrospect, but you have to consider the fact that I had no chance of going out and getting laid anyway. So why not see if I can rush for 4,000 yards with Barry Sanders and try and tack on another 1,000 with Rodney Peete? Besides, if anyone from school asked me what I got up to on the weekend I could just play my "visited with the girlfriend from out of town" card that I'm sure no one was even remotely suspicious of.

So let's begin the walk down Tecmo memory lane with a YouTube retrospective of the ten best players in the original 8-bit game. I promise the videos will get more esoteric and clever as we go on.

By now you've all seen Bo Jackson's incredible TD run that consumes an entire quarter of game play. But have you seen it with the Benny Hill theme playing as background music?

While Bo gets all the publicity for his Tecmo exploits, let's not forget Christian Okoye, who was so lethal that you really didn't have any use for the serviceable Barry Word when using the Chiefs. Here's a TD run with 61 broken tackles from the "Nigerian Nightmare".

With running skills like that, it wasn't too difficult to lead the Chiefs to the Super Bowl - even with Steve De Berg at QB - and watch this majestic credits sequence.

You would not believe the sheer volume of Tecmo Bowl vids on YouTube. Can you believe someone took the time to upload Steve Grogan dinking and dunking down the field with John Stephens for a flawless TD drive? Can you believe I watched the whole thing?

People also got creative with the game. Here's Dan Marino's famous fake-spike TD to Mark Ingram synched up with the live game call.

And here's someone re-creating Ricky Williams' 2007 season, Tecmo style.

I'll leave you with this haunting look at Tecmo Bowl TD hookups that never were. It's worth waiting for number 10, trust me. Eerie.

Oh, and one more thing - you know when you guess the other team's play and your defence just swarms the opposition for a crippling loss? There is no better feeling than this. That's right. I'd put it even higher than stuffing a guy in pick up basketball, hitting the sweet spot on your bat in the 90 mph batting cage or the birth of your first child any day.