The 15 Jankiest Sports Video Game Crowds

Making the crowds in sports games look good has got to be considered an art unto itself in the game development community. A lot of work must go into making sure that the legions of fans in stadiums and rinks look passable without taking up too much processing power. It's an admirable task, and we admire those who undertake it.

But sometimes it just doesn't work out, and those crowds in sports video games come out looking janky as all hell. Maybe there's a glitch that causes them to go haywire, or maybe they just looked like shit to begin with.

In honor of the Miami Heat fans who knew nothing about basketball and the showdown with Cleveland, we decided to write a little list about bad sports game crowds. No matter what the problem, these are the 15 jankiest sports video game crowds we could find.

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Madden NFL 08 apparently has a glitch where the crowd will just full-on be altered upon a succesful interception. Maybe the crowd is supposed to look different depending on who has possession, and doesn't know to react when it changes mid-play. Either way, that is janky.

…but we're pretty sure he's not supposed to appear like this. In this glitch from Fifa 12, a random player runs out of the stands and directly onto the field. And by out of the stands we mean out of the stands, as in straight through the walls.

The designers at THQ that created the WWF games on Nintendo 64 probably figured we'd be looking at those bodacious wrestling babes and not the crowds in the background. That's the only excuse we can think of for why they move constantly between the same two frames of animation at literally 2 frames per second.

Most Street Fighter 2 players concentrated on the fighters themselves, but if you took a look in the background you'd see some pretty shady characters hanging around. Particularly that guy in the trench coat bouncing rhythmically up and down. What the hell was he doing anyway? We think we probably don't want to know.

Here's another doozy of a glitch. According to this Youtube user, the crowd in NBA 2K13 apparently just fails to load sometimes. We've never seen this glitch ourselves, but the proof is in the video. A nonexistent crowd certainly qualifies as janky in our book.

In this physics glitch from NHL 10 the net somehow flies over the barricade and directly into the crowd. The great thing about sports video game audiences is that they never react to anything, and watching them sit there as an enormous net hurtles toward them is like watching fish in a barrel.

This may be a minor gripe, but once you see it it can't be unseen. The crowd in MLB 2K6 (not 2K's finest work to begin with) has got way too much flesh tone in it. It almost makes it look like half the fans are naked, or at least playing for skins. Maybe the players are just nervous and picturing the audience that way?

This is no glitch, and really it's only janky in the sense that Darth Vader has no business whatsoever in the crowd of a wrestling game. Yeah, Darth Vader. We're pretty sure Superman was in there somewhere as well. Totally on purpose, and in some ways a funny homage, but we just had to include it because of what little sense it makes.

This only applies to the Wii version of Madden NFL 10. Nintendo's last-gen system was famously underpowered, and this definitely isn't the only example of where developers had to cut corners on the Wii. Seriously, though, that crowd has about four different characters models just copied and pasted about 100 times.

The crowd in John Madden Football '93 actually looked better (but only slightly—let's be honest) in the SNES and Sega Genesis versions of the game, but on 3DO it was just god awful. As in it literally looked like God barfed into a football stadium and maintenance only had time to clean off the field before the game started.

Here's another glitch, and a well-known one at that. By gaming those good old physics it's actually possible to get beyond the barriers and into the crowd in WWE '13, going out of your opponents' reaches and basically screwing up the whole game. And the crowd, being a sports video game crowd, naturally does not react to this at all.

THEIR ARMS! THE ENTIRE CROWD IS MISSING THEIR ARMS! THE WORLD OF WII SPORTS TENNIS IS UNDER ATTACK BY A VICIOUS ARM-LOVING LAND SHAR—oh wait, that's just how ridiculous all Miis look. False alarm.

Not to be "those guys," but seriously, all we see in the NES game Pro Wrestling are white people and whiter people. We know the NES could render more colors than this. And why are there so many mimes at a wrestling match anyway?

Sometimes drawing a whole crowd of people is just too much work. Sometimes even drawing one person and copy+pasting it a hundred times is too much work. Such was apparently the case with Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX 2, in which the audience looks like some garbled graphics on a scratched disc or dusty cartridge. But nope, that's just how it looked.

Our victories in Cruise'n USA was always bittersweet. On one hand, it feels good to win. On the other, reaching the finish line at all always meant having to look at those dudes spinning their shirts and pumping their fists in the background. Even the "photorealistic" ladies were little consolation in the face of that. In our opinion this takes the cake for janky sports game crowds, eats it, then craps it out all over the screen.

Did we miss any? What's your favorite messed up sports game crowd?