“It was a snowball effect from there,” Brown says. “I still remember coming to the site one day and seeing a link for updated jerseys, and I was freaking out,” Glen “DrGullen” Brown says.īrown, a Senators fan, downloaded the file, started the game and eventually saw Ottawa’s new, profile-view logo looking back at him.
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If the update files started out simply, they didn’t stay that way. “It was still pretty primitive,” Franco says. In 2009, after six years of playing “2004” and without a new game on the horizon, Flavio “Franco Duck” Franco searched “updated NHL 04 rosters.” He found what he was looking for on, a Philadelphia fan forum.
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Like-minded gamers continued to find each other on a series of now-defunct message boards where, mainly, they’d trade updated rosters. Manually updating rosters in the PC game had always been simple enough and by 2009 was the only option. So when EA left the NHL/PC crowd to fend for itself, using “2004” as the building block was a sensible starting point for fans who wanted to build something of their own. Which, if you’re more than a casual fan, makes it more fun. Not, as Tuomainen said, “chaotic enough.”Īll that? Not a problem for “2004.” The game’s artificial intelligence, the thought process goes, is stronger than the 2005-09 versions. Consensus, though, then and now, was that the quality of EA’s PC games had been in decline since the 2005 release. And more than enough folks liked NHL PC gaming. One of the fundamental rules of the internet: If you like something, you can find others who like it, too. Tuomainen, and maybe tens of thousands of others, are enjoying the fruits from a tree planted 12 years ago, when EA abandoned the PC NHL crowd the studio hasn’t released a PC version of “NHL” since 2009. “I don’t want to take the spotlight from the guys who have made all this possible,” Tuomainen says. The real work - the thousands of lines of code, the endless series of Photoshop files and 3D models - isn’t theirs. Louis Blues,” write songs poking fun at early playoff eliminations and keep stats for every 82-game regular season - they’re ultimately consumers. For all the sweat equity Tuomainen and his friends put into their league - they make videos for milestones like Joe Thornton’s 1,000th point with the “St. To the victor goes the “Original Six” trophy and a dive into a Finnish lake. “We’re grown-ass men, every one of us, and we still dedicate our time to this.” “It’s hard to explain something like this,” Hannu Tuomainen says. The obsessive attention to detail is the point. The soundtrack, the graphics, the announcers - all, basically, unchanged from 18 years ago.
The end result is a game that grafts flourishes of customization and modernization to fundamental elements that modders wouldn’t change if they could. If you want to alter the physics of the game, or incorporate rule changes that came after the 2003-04 season, you can.įor the people who love it, it works. It’s “NHL 2004” with everything from 2021 - the players, arenas, jerseys, goal horns, pregame ceremonies - included in an enormous, downloadable series of “patches.” If you want to play as Cale Makar, or the Seattle Kraken, or at Climate Pledge Arena, or in the Penguins’ new alternate jerseys, you can.
The Original Six, all nine of them, are part of a community that’s larger still: the tinkerers, enthusiasts and obsessives behind what’s known as “NHL 04 Rebuilt,” a nearly full-scale reimagining of what many believe to be the greatest hockey game of all time, pulled from the past and kept fresh, vital and current through sheer force of will. They’re at the cabin to play a computer game that EA Sports sent to the dustbin nearly two decades ago - a game older than Shane Wright, the consensus No. Those are appetizers and incidentals, though. That’s the mindset that keeps them coming back - from cities like Jyväskylä and Tampere, once a year, Thursday through Sunday. There are nine of them now, but the name of their club is unchanged. In the town of Längelmäki, on the banks of one of Finland’s 188,000 lakes, there is a cabin where it’s always 2004.Įvery spring, the general managers of The Original Six make it so.
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