It’s in the game (because fans put it there) But this is the best PC hockey game you’ve never heard of. There’s the latest rosters, player photos, arena designs, and a complete alternative to the default interface. The graphics are, by today’s standards, woefully outdated, but the mod is surprisingly modern otherwise.
The result is NHL 2004 Rebuilt, a patched version of a game first released in 2003. So fans took the matter into their own hands. Hockey fans would either buy a console or stop playing hockey video games. Pre-Internet, the story would likely end there.
EA Sports hasn’t released a PC hockey game since the year before the first iPad came out. The Stanley Cup Final is just around the corner, meaning one team will drink from the best-looking trophy in professional sports. Gamers who want to play along at home, however, will have to buy a Playstation 4 or Xbox One. If you want to alter the physics of the game, or incorporate rule changes that came after the 2003-04 season, you can. 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.
Every spring, the general managers of The Original Six make it so. 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.
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