In the previous Tecmo Bowl for NES, each team has a roster of at least twenty players (twenty-one if the kick returner is not a starter), with nine players for offense, nine players for defense, a kicker, and a punter. In Tecmo Super Bowl, each roster has thirty different players. Each team has eleven defensive players who can be neither substituted nor injured. Each team has seventeen offensive players, which includes eleven starters and six substitutes. Eleven players are always on the field for each team.
In addition to using real teams and players, Tecmo Super Bowl incorporates the full-length 1991 NFL regular season schedule. Its playoff format includes the Super Bowl and the post-season Pro Bowl game.
Tecmo Super Bowl retains the arcade-style football gameplay of the predecessor, including the ability to break tackles and a lack of penalties. New features include the coin toss, fumbles, five-minute quarters, timeouts to avoid ten-second runoffs, statistical tracking, single season NFL records, expanded and editable playbooks with eight plays instead of four, the ability to substitute players, varying health conditions of players, and player injuries. The game expands on cut scenes for important events like touchdowns, halftime shows, injuries, or big plays.
Players can adjust offensive plays and substitute players for each NFL team and for the two Pro Bowl teams. The Pro Bowl team's roster can be edited. Offensive, defensive, and special-teams players may be viewed as individual "player cards" with statistics, attributes, and status. These can improve or decrease, making the player better or worse.