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This page is dedicated to preserving the history of Ro-Football, a once-niche corner of ROBLOX. I first began playing Ro-Football 13 years ago, and since then much of this information has been lost to time and forgotten about. There exists no video, archive or website which preserves all of my memories on this topic. Thus I wish to create my own.

Ro-football was in essence the very first co-op American football game ever made, which gives it unique quirks that even the great football games of yesteryear can't match. Even today the only co-op football game that I'm aware of outside of it is Gridiron^[1], which lacks many of the features that ro-football had in it's heyday. While you could create players and play their role on the field in many EA and 2K games in the past, all of the other players on your team and on the opposing team were AI. If you've ever played a AAA football game you know that the AI in these titles is not known for it's competence. It sullies the experience of these modes no matter how much depth they provide otherwise.

Ro-football offered an inherent advantage over the career mode in these games; the players on each team were all human. You could learn your position inside and out, of which there were legitimate fundamentals towards doing, and everyone had to fill their assignment. In this respect, it's almost the closest thing to real football that you can find in a video game space. It made the game feel like a truly team sport, just as the real life product is. If you made a mistake, people would call you out for it. If you did something well, your team would get hype. It offered a level of interaction that you couldn't find anywhere else.

Not only was the on-field product unique, but the other features of ROBLOX allowed for a unique level of immersion never captured in any football game before or since. Through the groups, clothing, and building features, players could their own leagues and teams, jersies, and stadiums respectively. The level of immersion that these features offered caused some players to treat the game almost like a RPG. People would roleplay in the chat, make their own player identities (names, skills, rating, number etc.), coaches would use admin commands to spawn models and run drills which actually helped you improve at the game, and if you excelled enough you could be granted honors by other players. Leagues kept records, scores, and other statistics. In fact, most leagues from the old days even have their own hall of fames, which were their own separate games. You could even script new gameplay mechanics if you were a skilled enough programmer. Your imagination was the limit.

What's more is that unlike most sports games, in Ro-Football one has complete control over their movement. Compared to modern sports titles where you often get sucked into scripted animations, anything that goes wrong in Ro-Football could (almost) always be placed squarely at the player's feet. This caused a wide variance in quality of play between different leagues to the point where the biggest leagues ended up making college equivalents for players to develop in and get drafted from.

I picked 2017 for a reason. In late 2016, Legendary Football released. Though it was a great recreation of Heroes featuring a lot of polish and attention to detail, it also came with the unintended side effect of drawing in a torrent of new players to the community. From Feburary of 2016 to December of 2016, ROBLOX's playerbase tripled in size^[1]. This in conjunction with the beginner friendly LF releasing at the same time caused it to highly exceed the player count of any football game before.

This had the result of new players, most of whom were rather young, outnumbering the older players. Consequently, the previous roleplay-heavy and fun-first culture was largely destroyed as the players saw no need to assimilate to what had preceded them. Many were likely ignorant of such a concept at all given that this was 2017 and that sort of old web ethos was well on it's way out by this point, ROBLOX as a whole having been one of the later holdouts of it. At first this only directly affected LF, but eventually these players expanded outwards and began to populate all of the games.

In the modern day, LF players and that which has come after it dwarf the pre 2017 players. Even in more traditional spaces like OFL where there are more oldgens, they are still easily outnumbered by those got into it after 2017. This caused many negative ramifications and has made the community rather undesirable to interact with. This in conjunction with how most leagues are now hosted exclusively behind walled gardens such as Discord caused me to lose most of my interest in it, and I would no longer consider it something worth bothering with in the current year.

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