Who is the most legendary video game Falcon?

It’s a video game-themed week this week at SB Nation, which is exciting for me because I am a lifelong, gigantic nerd. I got my first NES in 1989 and have been playing games ever since.

I’ve fallen out of love a bit with sports games over the years—I pick up a new Madden every 3-4 years, but the year-over-year changes aren’t usually that impressive—but some of my favorite memories are from those games. I played the hell out of Tecmo Super Bowl for the Super Nintendo back in the day, chasing undefeated seasons with Chris Miller bombing passes to Andre Rison and Michael Haynes. I have been losing games in excruciating fashion as the Falcons in Madden for 20 years, with the lone exception of the 2004 edition where I crafted an unstoppable team featuring a player we’re going to talk about in a second.

For today’s feature, I wanted to talk about the most dominant Falcons in video game history. As I see it, there are really only two logical nominees, though I welcome yours.

Tecmo Super Bowl Deion Sanders

Deion was unstoppable in this game. Not only was he one of the game’s few shutdown cornerbacks, capable of putting the brakes on even the best receivers in the game, but he was absurdly great as a returner. I once scored 10 return touchdowns in a single season with Prime Time, owing to speed that allowed him to toy with would-be tacklers who slid uselessly across the field.

He wasn’t quite Tecmo Bowl Bo Jackson, but he was close enough to let me dominate that game.

Madden 2004 Michael Vick

Simply unstoppable. I’ve been playing my best friend in Madden for decades, as I mentioned, and he’s simply better than me at Madden. Typically if we play through a 30 year franchise mode (me with the Falcons, him with the Bills), he’s winning the Super Bowl 2/3rds of the time, which is a source of great shame to me.

The exception was this edition with this Falcons team, and it was because Vick was a digital superhero in this game. Not only could Vick flick passes downfield to whatever receivers I drafted and nurtured to replace Peerless Price, but he could take off running at any moment and bust out gains of 75 yards against even quality defenses. The inability to stop him through the air or on the ground made him basically impossible to defend, and I had to beat myself by throwing foolish interceptions or enduring one of those rare fumbles on a scramble that the game forced to balance things out.

Pick your choice in the poll below, or let us know who we missed.