When EA Sports signed Tiger Woods to work with their golf teams on golf games in 1998, they planned a transition so that the PGA Tour Golf series would take on the "Tiger Woods" name. The evolution of the series has been continual since 1990 (as opposed to starting from scratch for the first Tiger product), so the gaming roots of the franchise are 18 years old. World Tour Golf had been a hit for EA in the mid-80s, but pre-dated the company's annual-update sports franchise strategy.



The early versions of Tiger Woods Golf were executive produced by Richard Hilleman (one of the key figures in the creation of EA Sports) and Jon Horsley, and produced by pioneering Activision game programmer Steve Cartwright.

The first version of the game to bear Tiger's name was Tiger Woods '99, released in 1998. The title of the game was subsequently changed in 1999 to Tiger Woods PGA Tour X, with X being the year of the season the game corresponds to (generally the year after the year of the title's release). Currently eleven games have been released under the Woods license. Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf is the title of the first game in the series made for the Game Boy Advance, and corresponds with the 2003 version of the game. Tiger Woods PGA Tour denotes the first game in the series made for both the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable, and both correspond to the 2005 version of the game.

Although most games in the series have been developed internally at EA studios, some SKUs have come from outside developers including the very first one, Tiger Woods PGA Tour '99, which was developed by Adrenalin Entertainment in conjunction with EA for the PS1, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2001 for the PS1, which was developed by Stormfront Studios.

A mobile version of the game (Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf) first appeared in 2002, developed by IOMO and published by Digital Bridges under licence from EA. Two more iterations Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf 2004 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 were also developed by IOMO.

A more arcade-style golf game called CyberTiger was released for the PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and Game Boy Color systems in 2000. This is similar to the PGA series only in that both use Tiger Woods' name.