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Photo by Handout / Canuckplay.com

By Gerry Moddejonge

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EDMONTON — Fans of the Canadian Football League finally have the video game they’ve always wanted.

Kind of…

Oh, it’s all there. From three downs and 110 yards to the waggle and, yes, even the ability to pull off a kick-it-in/kick-it-out of the end zone should the scenario arise.

Nine teams from stadiums in their proper Canadian cities, with players represented by three-dimensional graphics created through motion-capture technology. What more could joystick jockeys looking to get their fix of the Canadian gridiron game want?

Well, besides the actual teams and players, that is.

Canadian Football ’17 dropped Wednesday morning on Xbox Live and Steam, putting the three-down circuit into the hands of fans on a major console for the first time. For indie publisher David Winter, president of Canuck Play, based out of Peterborough, Ont., it’s his first time releasing a Canadian football game since CFL Football ’99 for PC.

“Consoles, up until very recently, were extraordinarily expensive to create games for,” Winter said. “You needed a big publisher, you had to be spending millions of dollars. It was really outside the realm of possibility to do a console title. But Canuck Play solved that by getting a publishing deal with Microsoft, so that put us on the Xbox One. Here we are now, publishing the very first Canadian football game on a major console, and we’re also launching a PC desktop port of that game.”