History

In The Beginning

The World Tecmo Federation didn't begin with some grand plan to reshape the online Tecmo Super Bowl community. In reality, it started rather organically, the way many great ideas do: a few people were talking, an existing situation wasn't working out, and someone said, essentially, "Why don't we just start our own league?"

It was sometime in spring 2007, during my early days in the online Tecmo Super Bowl community. I had joined the Tecmo Player's Circuit (TPC) around December 2006, the same time as two other players, one being KidPro84.

At the time, getting established in the online Tecmo community wasn't exactly easy for a newcomer as many of the existing leagues had limited openings and lengthy waiting lists. There was already a fairly well-established group of players, and breaking into that group could take some time. Fortunately for us, there was sufficient demand for a new league geared towards newcomers to be created, which KidPro84 and I joined. That league was the National Tecmo League (NTL).

While the NTL solved the above problem (to some degree), eventually KidPro84 had a disagreement with the administrator of the NTL and left. I believe either I left or the league folded soon after, but I don't completely recall.

Rather than simply move on to another existing league, we started talking about the possibility of creating one ourselves. If we were going to start from scratch, there was no reason we had to simply emulate the leagues that already existed. We could build the kind of league that we wanted to play in.

And that was when the idea of a dynasty league began to take shape.

Tecmo Super Bowl was a deep football game for its era, but the game itself didn't have the sort of persistent franchise mode that we take for granted in games such as Madden or ESPN NFL 2K5. You could play a season, but there wasn't really a mechanism for your team to exist as a continuing organization from one season to the next.

We wanted to change that.

Instead of starting over and redrafting the same players every season, we envisioned franchises that would persist. Teams would have long-term owners. New players could be acquired through drafts and free agency, traded between teams, develop based on their performance, see their attributes decline as they aged, and eventually retire. The decisions made by an owner in one season would have consequences in future seasons.

In other words, we weren't just trying to create another Tecmo league.

We were trying to create a franchise mode for Tecmo Super Bowl that the game itself didn't have.

Once we had the basic concept, we needed a name.

KidPro84 and I eventually settled on World Tecmo Federation, or simply WTF. There wasn't some elaborate branding exercise behind it. We just liked the way the name sounded. It had the kind of grandiose sports-league feel we were looking for, and the funny acronym certainly didn't hurt its memorability.

The next person we approached was the other player I mentioned earlier, former fellow NTL member LordSummerIsle64.

He was receptive to the idea and decided to join us. One thing that made him particularly useful to the project was his background as a college mathematics professor. We knew that a dynasty system was going to require considerably more analytical work than a conventional Tecmo league. There would be initial player attributes, aging, development, transactions, statistics, and all sorts of rules that would have to be worked out and kept consistent.

Having somebody with a strong mathematical and analytical background seemed like a pretty good idea.

And so, almost without realizing it, the three of us had gone from being relatively new members of the community to trying to build an entirely new league of our own.

At that point, we had a name, a concept, and three people willing to make it happen.

What we didn't yet know was whether anyone else would actually want to join.

As it turned out, quite a few people did. We started out with 15 original owners in season 1 and expanded to 20 in subsequent seasons.

That first season in 2007 would eventually prove to be much more than simply an alternative for players who couldn't get into one of the established leagues. Despite a few vocal naysayers, It became the standard for what an online Tecmo Super Bowl dynasty league could be, even spawning numerous spinoff leagues under the WTF umbrella (I'll talk about those at a later date).

Nearly 20 years later, various elements from the original WTF continue to live on in other leagues, proving that the WTF had an unprecedented impact on the community.

WTFPhile

In the beginning, running the World Tecmo Federation wasn't particularly complicated from a technological standpoint.

During the first season or two, we relied heavily on a website called TecmoPhile, which was operated by a Tecmo community member known as Snatches. TecmoPhile provided an important piece of infrastructure for the growing online Tecmo community. It allowed league administrators to keep track of rosters, statistics, game results, and other information without having to maintain everything manually.

For a conventional online league, this was more than enough.

But WTF wasn't a conventional online league.

The entire premise of the World Tecmo Federation was that teams and players were supposed to persist from one season to the next. As the league progressed, the amount of information we needed to track continued to grow. It wasn't enough to know who was on each roster during the current season. We needed to know where those players had come from, what they had done in previous seasons, how their attributes had changed, how long they had been in the league, and what transactions had taken place along the way.

The more seasons we played, the more apparent the limitation became.

TecmoPhile was fundamentally designed around the concept of a single season. WTF was designed around the concept of a dynasty. Those two things require completely different infrastructure

A single-season league can essentially answer questions like:

A dynasty league has to answer much larger questions:

As WTF continued to develop, we realized that we were beginning to push TecmoPhile beyond what it had originally been designed to do.

Fortunately, we didn't have to start completely from scratch.

At some point during the league's early years, Snatches shared the TecmoPhile code with Brookston Fowler, who was himself one of the original WTF owners. Brookston began modifying and expanding the system over time, adapting it to the increasingly complex requirements of the league.

What began as an existing league-management system gradually became something much more specialized.

Brookston's work eventually resulted in WTFPhile, a version of the TecmoPhile system built specifically around the needs of a dynasty league.

This was an important transition for WTF.

The software could now accommodate many of the concepts that made the league different in the first place. Instead of treating each season as an isolated entity, the system could maintain the continuity that was fundamental to the WTF experience. Players, teams, statistics, transactions, and historical information could be connected across multiple seasons.

In a sense, the technology was starting to catch up with the idea.

When we first created WTF, we had started with the concept of a persistent Tecmo franchise and then figured out how to make it work. As the league grew, we discovered that our ideas had consequences that extended far beyond simply changing a few rules.

We needed infrastructure capable of remembering the history we were creating.

WTFPhile became that infrastructure.

And this evolution is an important part of the history of online Tecmo itself. TecmoPhile had helped make organized online leagues possible by providing a way to manage their statistics and results. WTF's increasingly elaborate dynasty system, in turn, demonstrated the need for something capable of maintaining a league's history across multiple seasons.

What began as a few people trying to create a different kind of Tecmo league had gradually become something that required its own technological ecosystem.

The league was no longer simply being played, it was being documented, managed, and preserved as an ongoing virtual franchise system.

More to come...