Sports games have always been one of my favourite genres. I accidentally fell into them. Match Day was released during my avid Spectrum playing years – back in 1985 I had saved months of my pocket money to buy International Karate, but my local computer shop had sold out. So buy something else, the computer shop owner said. He was a northern lad, big beard and a permanent smell of cigarette smoke about him — “It’s football, innit? Kids like football”.
I didn’t care about football, I wanted to chop fools up as a tiny martial arts sprite, but there wasn’t International Karate or I wasn’t buying Match Day. Honestly, football games were miles away from EA Sports in 1985. Match Day featured tiny pixelated players on a nicely drawn football pitch (compared to the usual grid style football pitches you saw in other games). Sure the players were tiny (little more than pixels that moved) but my god they moved like footballers. Run, shoot, tackle. There was even the ability to header the ball if you pulled the joystick at the right time.
I spent my entire weekend sat at my desk playing match after match against the computer. Loading games took roughly 3 minutes (standard for a cassette game) but didn’t bother me too much as I had worked out my game plan for the next match by the time it finished loading. To me this was the pinnacle of realistic football gaming. Nothing like the arcadey abstraction you found in many sports titles. Admittedly I am being kind here as every player looked the same and the ball was simply a white square but hey you filled in the gaps with your imagination.
My friend Paul came round on Sunday afternoon expecting me to be battering aliens or hopping around as Mario, instead he found me obsessively playing what he thought was “dry football rubbish”. Within thirty seconds he was addicted. We spent the rest of the day playing game after game smashing our arms up defending (“God you’re nuts Jon, easy!”), we commentated our own matches (“Ok Johnson’s through down the left…” oh wait we had no idea who was Johnson) and even kept a league table in an exercise book.
Don’t get me started on the Amiga. I got my A500 for Christmas 1988 and downloaded Kick Off 2 shortly after. It blew my tiny mind. Real ball physics — players could run at actual angles to each other, you could curl your passes and god it looked great. The players were incredible for the time and had so much detail (actual players!) but were near-on impossible to play against and required skill to play properly. To this day it took me weeks to score a non-deflection goal.
[From Stick Men to Superstars: My Four Decades Watching Sports Games][1]
Sensible Soccer hit the shelves in 1992 and turned me into a useless student. Tiny sprites but addictive gameplay. You could pick real teams (ok not really teams, due to licensing Sensible had renamed Man United to Man Unified and players were named Giggs R instead of Ryan Giggs. But we knew who they should have been!) and you could even play tournaments with World Cup. The game literally programmed in realistic fixtures so you could play a near true account of a World Cup. There was one summer where me and five others from college had a World Cup that ran for three weeks. Two of my friendships still haven’t recovered from one off-side decision..
I honestly didn’t understand American sports games at first. They didn’t get games like Madden or NBA Jam simultaneously with the US — infact many games we didn’t even get at all. So when I finally played John Madden Football on the Mega Drive it was like watching alien life-forms playing a sport I knew nothing about. Don’t get me started on the rules — way too complicated and stops too much. But watching the video game translate the sport made sense to me. Implementing a playbook to dictate how you wanted to play each game was inspired. No longer were games arcade dumps of you running about hoping for the best, you could implement REAL strategies.
Ice Hockey took over my life by accident. Growing up in England we had no exposure to Ice Hockey whatsoever. Until NHL ‘94 graced the Amiga computers. Fast, violent and skill rewarding. It was everything a sports title should be. Bare in mind fighting had been taken out because I would have spent 90% of the game chucking fights rather than playing actual hockey. I learnt the players name, started watching NHL games and followed seasons because of that game. My local newsagent began stocking American sport magazines for me as I would pester him asking for hockey coverage.
The Amiga gifted us with sports games that were better than almost anything consoles had to offer. And everyone talks about Mario and Zelda and even Quacky Dodgers. But we had some fucking cool shit that never saw mainstream console gaming. Speed Ball 2 wasn’t a sport. A mixture of futuristic handball, rugby league and utter violence but hey it was way better than picking your favourite football team and hoping to win a arcade game. You bought players, sold players, improve your teams attributes and managed the team’s money. It was a fully fleshed out management sim before CM even existed.
Championship Manager ate my life for my final year at university. Technically not a sports game as it didn’t feature actual gameplay, just tables and stuff, but oh my god was it addictive. Instead of playing as the team you managed them from the sidelines. You made decisions and the game would text update you with what happened. Sounds dull I know, and most definitely is dull, but I found it so rewarding finishing bottom one season with a team of potato soup and heading to the Premier League my second season.
Console games quickly evolved to be on par with computer sports games as technology improved. FIFA looked bloody beautiful on the Mega Drive compared to computer games. They even used real player faces! And the crowd noise was amazing. It sounded like you were watching a real football match in progress. SNES version was a lot smoother than Mega Drive but lacked detail. But both versions blew the computers out of the water. Everything was glossy, even the commentary was good and it actually sounded like you were watching a professionally made TV match.
The next thing I got obsessed in was Basketball. Yep, spent hours on end playing NBA games but never actually watched basketball. NBA Jam had taken over the arcades with ridiculous dunks, players on fire when they got hot, and commentators cheering every goal as if it was the game winner. Complete unrealistic garbage but pure heaven to play. Home versions were never able to capture the magic of the arcade cabinets but were close enough to occupy you for hours on end.
Annual Sports games finally made sense to me halfway through the 90’s when the licenses came through and teams and players could be swapped over year by year. Up until then sports games were just games. You bought International Soccer and you played it until something else came along. But when real teams and players started entering the games you HAD to update your old games. Licenses finally happened and along with licenses came player names and their actual attributes. Upgrading from FIFA ‘95 to FIFA ’96 with this years transfers felt like a totally new game.
Player creation allowed you to obsess over making the perfect player. Creating that Frankenstein’s monster in FIFA games (looked like me but had way more useable skills). Starting him at a low league team and then moving him on via transfers as you honed his skills. Even created back-stories for my player that nobody cared about except for me and it kept me playing for months.
My favourite thing about sports games came to be the career modes. I preferred them to playing tournaments or random matches. You felt like you were accomplishing something by playing career mode as you built up something rather than just playing games. My Frankenstein player scored 47 goals in his first season playing Premiership football. Utterly unrealistic but so satisfying.
Tech limitations allowed workaround solutions that actually made for better gameplay than what we have today. Lack of players on screen in Sensible allowed you to see the whole pitch which allowed you to make smart decisions as you knew exactly what was going on around you. There weren’t multiple skills to remember how to do tricks, it was basically joystick control and a kick button. Meaning you had to use skills instead of mindless button mashing.
Monthly FIFA tournaments were the highlight of many nights out in my twenties. As soon as we shut the pub we setup 8 player elimination tournaments that didn’t finish until we stumbled out the following morning. We even had rule sets. No Barca or Man United allowed, no more than 3 games a person, champions had to defend their title or be banned from next round ties. We kept a year long league table and still haven’t spoken to each other about a dodgy penalty 7 years later.
Then 3D ruined everything… ok it didn’t but it took games a while to get it right. The first incarnations of 3D football looked terrible. Players jittered about like robots, animations weren’t smooth and you couldn’t get a good angle on half the matches. It took ages for developers to get 3D games to play as good as the best 2D games had. I think FIFA ’98 was probably the first 3D game that was better than Sensible… and Sensible will always be better.
I loved how commentary evolved over the years. Started off with crowd noises and primitive sound bites, to triggered phrases when certain actions happened to what we have today. Games could now understand what was happening in a match and actually commentate on it accordingly. Remember when I first heard actual commentary in a Amiga game? (think it was Premier Manager)….it blew my mind that the computer could “watch” the match and commentate on what was happening.
Europe got totally different games compared to US. We had Football management games, Cricket games, Rugby league games that probably sold less than 10 copies outside of England. But whilst America was on Redskins and Bulls we were making our own identity with Computer Gaming. Games like Microprose Soccer and Player Manager had so much more depth than their console counterparts. Limitations on controls and memory hindered console games from matching the depth of Computer Sports.
Arcade sports games were a totally different category to home ones. Track and Field wasn’t a real sport but who cared when you mashed buttons to run faster in events. Konamis brilliant ice hockey game featured enormous player sprites and was miles better than NHL on the consoles. Bowling and golf games were better on cabinets than they ever were on a controller at home. Point being, arcade sports games offered experiences that were fun for a few minutes, where as home games were there to be savoured.
[From Stick Men to Superstars: My Four Decades Watching Sports Games][2]
Once the internet became involved in gaming it was game over for us avid sports fans. Updating your squads became easier with freshly uploaded squads from around the world. User based CM leagues, foreign leagues, older seasons. What once was a single player experience suddenly became a joined community where we could share ideas and argue over player ratings.
These days sports games look better than we could have ever imagined possible. But sometimes I miss the characters of older games. These days FIFA games look like they are taken from a real match but they lack the character of old Sensible Soccer goal celebrations and brutal wow did that hurt tackles in Kick Off 2. These days everything has to look slick and professional but all they lack is personality. Maybe I’m just being nostalgic but these early games were goofy as hell and had charm to them because of their flaws.
Still play sports games nowadays but my reaction times aren’t what they used to be and online football has been taken over by 15-year-old socially awkward males with way too much time on their hands. Luckily single player career modes still exist and allow me to get that satisfaction of building a team up like I did when I created my first player 20+ years ago. Creating franchises, buying players and living the virtual athlete lifestyle that life has denied us.
I have been playing sports games for nearly 40 years and watched the industry progress and evolve to give us the best technology possible to meet the goals of creating the ultimate sports game experience. Every year was better than the last. Some focused on pure gameplay and some perfected the art of playing actual sports. But each one defined a generation of gamers and gave us all countless hours of pure enjoyment. Not bad for a genre that started out as moving dots kicking a square.
Joe’s a history teacher who treats the console wars like actual history. A lifelong Sega devotee from Phoenix, he writes with passion, humor, and lingering heartbreak over the Dreamcast. Expect strong opinions, bad puns, and plenty of “blast processing.”
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