All-Pro Football 2K8 is the only football game that 2K has produced since Madden got the exclusive NFL license in 2004.
Now, this isn't a dealbreaker! You can still make a football game without the NFL involved. Getting the license for a major sports league is important because you want to be able to use their branding and intellectual property, which includes things like team logos, or possibly the stadiums, depending on how that's managed. But you know what the league license DOESN'T include? The rights to the players.
Most major professional sports leagues in the US have player unions, usually called "players associations." These groups are responsible for collective bargaining for player contracts, so when there's a lockout in a professional sport, it's because the player association has gone on strike. These groups also control the rights to the players, and they can be negotiated and licensed separately from the league trademarks.
There's a lot you can do with just player rights. You can include the players' names and likenesses. You can even identify what real-world teams they play for! You just can't include any of the team or league trademarks. It's not perfect, but a few sports games have licensed the players directly without the league.
For instance, Out of the Park Baseball is a series of really nerdy, stats-driven baseball sims that have been produced in Germany since 1999. For the first 15 years of their history, instead of getting the MLB license, they got the MLBPA license. So you could play as the Washington Nationals in the NL East with all the right players, they would just have no logo and play in a generic stadium.
(I wanted to get a screenshot of this because I own an older edition of OOTP, but unfortunately their online authentication servers are no longer working! Luckily it is legal for consumers to break copy protection for a legally acquired offline game to get it to run again! See Para. (17)(i). I just didn't want to go through that effort for this post.)
Unfortunately, Madden also got the exclusive rights to the NFLPA, so you couldn't get just the player names. With the rights for both teams and players tied up, some companies threw in the towel and made completely fictional football games instead. Midway, for instance, made Blitz: The League, an NFL Blitz spinoff without any real teams or players, which let it go in a more extreme direction.
But remember that players are licensed separately from leagues. And you know who also has a separate licensing association? RETIRED PLAYERS.
That's right. Players who are no longer active in the league have their own independent players association, the Pro Football Retired Players Association (PFRPA). They operate a licensing group called the Football Greats Alliance, which handles the rights for their members. If you want to license the New England Patriots, you go through the NFL. But you want to use Tom Brady? You're going through PFRPA. That's how Arcade1up was able to get NFL Blitz re-released with at least some of the original players included.
2K saw the opportunity here and went in a different direction than their competitors: a game with fictional teams but real, retired players.
That's what All-Pro Football 2K8 was! It was an attempt to make a best-selling football game by licensing the names/stats of real players who no longer had any legal obligations to the NFL, like John Elway and Jerry Rice (of Dog Football fame). The PFRPA didn't exist until 2016, so 2K probably had to go through multiple different talent agencies, or maybe even license individual players. Either way, the upside is that getting a handful of old pros like this must have been way, way cheaper than what a league license would have cost.
But we're not done yet! Now we know about the specific legal issues that resulted in 2K making a game where you play as retired football players. But that still doesn't answer the question: Why can you play as OJ Simpson?
This all comes down to timing. I don't want to suggest there was ever a time since 1994 when OJ Simpson—who almost certainly murdered Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman—was not controversial, but starting around 2006, OJ Simpson attempted to rehabilitate his media image by leaning into his notoriety. First off and most obviously, there's his book If I Did It, where he ghoulishly explained how he would have murdered his victims, if, you know, hypothetically, he did it, just saying.
He also starred in the hidden camera prank special Juiced, which, I cannot emphasize enough, was a real hour-long PPV special where OJ Simpson played pranks on people. I skimmed through it for the sake of this post, and it's pretty awful. A lot of it is the usual "There's too much fucking shit on me" level of prank comedy, but there's also a sketch where OJ attempts to sell his white Ford Bronco at a used car lot and brags about its "escapability." The runtime is also padded out with softcore pornography, which, okay.
If you really want to watch it, someone ripped the DVD and uploaded it to the Internet Archive.
Has “JUICED” taken reality TV too far? The jury is still out, but one thing is for certain – it will never be the same again!! GET PREPARED TO GET JUICED!!! YOU WON'T BELIEVE YOUR EYES!!!
Juiced was distributed by XEG (Xtreme Entertainment Group), a direct-to-DVD trash company that also sold videos like World's Wildest Bachelor Parties, Felony Fights, and Crazy White Boys. This is the level of publicity OJ was reduced to, yet he still went for it.
Which brings us to All-Pro Football 2K8. It makes sense that at this late stage of his career, when OJ was otherwise reduced to doing prank comedy for the makers of Bum Hunts, he would want in on this. This was an opportunity to burnish his image by appearing in a cast of all-time NFL players and dog football entrepreneurs. In the game, he plays for the Miami Cyclones, a fictional team in Florida, the state where he retired in the hopes of escaping ever having to pay the $33.5 million civil judgment he owed for the rest of his life over the murder of Brown and Goldman.
In an extremely bad confluence of events, one of the fictional teams in APF 2K8 is the New Jersey Assassins, which has a dagger in their logo, and the players do a throat-slitting gesture when they get a touchdown.
Do you want to guess what team everyone immediately traded OJ Simpson to?
2K, for their part, was quick to clarify this was a user-created scenario:
The decision of Take-Two's 2K Sports label to include Simpson in the game, despite his past, could possibly be defended, considering his place in football history. But's it's unclear why the company would use a mascot that had the potential to play on Simpson's notoriety as the accused in the 1994 murder of his former wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ron Goldman.
[...]
2K Sports' decision leaves the company open to accusations of bad taste, but, at its worst, it suggests a comfort level with Simpson's past to profit and promote a video game that many parents would likely buy as a normal sports-game purchase.
[...]
Take-Two declined to answer specific questions relating to whether Simpson approved the use of the mascot in the game. But a company spokesperson forwarded a statement saying that the knifelike motion from the mascot is "not specifically associated with O.J. Simpson, and the game does not promote any such connection."
As for why 2K thought it was a good idea to license OJ Simpson in the first place? They've never commented on it, but when the game was in development, slightly over a decade had passed since his murder trial. OJ had decided, however coldly and calculatedly, that it was time to start laughing at himself. It might have seemed like his public image was about to thaw.
Prior to 2005, nobody would have made a football game starring retired players, and good taste would have prevented them from even considering including OJ Simpson. Given the unique set of circumstances that led to the production of All-Pro Football 2K8, apparently 2K decided that OJ, as a former all-star, was worth including.
Two months after the release of APF 2K8, OJ Simpson was arrested for armed robbery.
This was the only time it was possible to publish a video game starring OJ Simpson. It was—and will remain, for good reason—his only video game appearance.
