I shudder to think what percentage of my life I’ve spent playing football computer games. From Championship Manager marathons that stretched long into the night, to whole days lost to Pro Evo at university, they’ve been a source of joy, frustration and, weirdly, pride (winning the Champions League with Ross County should really be on my CV).
Now Bath-based Bitmap Books has published A Tale of Two Halves: A History of Football Video Games, a fascinating 600-page exploration of how these games changed between 1980 and 2010. It features more than 400 games, as well as interviews with some of the developers whose work defined this genre.
Author Richard Moss says the book tells two parallel, and interconnected stories. One is about technological advances that drove the design and gameplay forward. The other is about how fans want to interact with the beautiful game through this medium.
“Our relationship with the sport is constantly evolving, and football computer games have always been a reflection of – and an influence on – that relationship,” Moss says.
He says there was “a shift in the core design” of these games at the end of the 1990s.
“For a long time, they were focused on pick-up-and-play fun with long skill curves. With just a few basic commands, you could get competent really fast, but the skill ceiling was massive. With Kick Off and Sensible Soccer for instance, you had dozens of advanced skills you could develop through clever combinations of joystick movement and the kick/slide button.”
These were computer games first, and football games second, he explains. But as the graphics developed, the games took on a more realistic, “TV-like presentation.” Now they were football games first and foremost. “We went from abstraction to mimicry,” Moss says.
Obviously across the 30 years covered by the book, the games change massively. But Moss thinks the best ones have certain things in common – elegance, flow, and minimal friction.
They also all play to our individual lust for narrative.
“The biggest thing, whatever the game, is to get the player telling themself stories in their head about what’s happening, from moment to moment at a micro level, as well as over the longer-term at a macro level.”
Conversely, there are common struggles. Goalkeepers and off-the-ball movements have posed a lot of challenges, as well as animating the actual interaction between a player and the ball, “although that’s more a technical than a design issue,” Moss explains.
Off-the-field, clunky interfaces have been an issue too. “So many promising football games have been hamstrung by tedious menu navigation and unintuitive UI or UX design,” Moss says.
Among the 400 games, alongside the famous favourites you’d expect, there are a number of bizarre titles and strange genre mash-ups.
“I think the weirdest game I looked at was an amateur Amiga football management title from the late 1990s called Philips SV Eindhoven Manager.
“Right from the Monty Python-laden start-up sequence, you know you’re in for something weird. The game is packed with sound samples and still images ripped from a plethora of popular TV shows and movies, and there are lots of photos of various moments from real professional football matches too.
“It’s constantly surprising, and a fine realisation of the concept of a postmodern football game.”
“The biggest thing is to get the player telling themself stories in their head.”
He was also baffled by RedCard, a GameCube and PlayStation 2 title from 2003. Its violence sparked some controversy at the time – players can launch flying kicks to the heads of their opponents, for example. But Moss says it gets much stranger than that.
“At first it just seems to all be in bad taste. But if you advance past the first match in its world conquest mode, suddenly it all comes together as this incredible and bizarre experience.
“After playing against regular people, you next play a team of dolphins. Later opponents include a SWAT team, some red-and-orange-hued aliens, and a team of kraken.”
Looking to the future, Moss isn’t convinced that we’ll see a big leap forward any time soon.
“You’ve got to go back roughly 20 years to get the last leap, which was low-latency online play of 3D football games,” he explains. “Since then it’s been all about incremental improvements, or simply changes, as not every new or updated feature is actually better than the old one.”
That said, he does think “more advanced adaptive AI systems” will have a positive influence. For example, he sees a world where computer opponents learn how someone plays the game, and develops, “nuanced, personalised strategies to counteract your behaviour.” Sensible Soccer it is not.
We asked Richard to pick out the games which represented the big design milestones in his book:
Football Manager – The original Kevin Toms version invented the genre, with a compulsive “one more game” play loop to it, and his 1982 Spectrum port had this fantastic graphical match engine where you’d only see goalscoring chances. Nearly every management title that followed is a fancier version of this one.
NES Soccer / Konami’s Soccer – These two games, released a few months apart in 1985, introduced the idea of assisted passing, so you point your joystick roughly in the direction of a player and press the pass button, then the game automatically sends the ball towards them.
This paved the way for the more organic, less frantic, more passing-focused and realistic football games that emerged a decade later.
Championship Manager – It was derisively labelled a spreadsheet simulator by its detractors, but its data-driven design and logical no-frills UI and menu system turned out to be just what hardcore football fans wanted.
Sensible World of Soccer – Arguably 2D football perfected, but the big design innovation was off-pitch in its oft-imitated dynamic transfer system. It was elegant, clear, and straight to the point – perfect for a management-lite career mode in a football action game.
FIFA International Soccer – Tremble ye humble mortal, for I am becoming a football god. FIFA got a lot of things right, but the key thing it did from a design perspective is to make the player do cool stuff even before they’ve learnt the controls.
Just mash the buttons and within seconds you’ll end up doing a bicycle kick or a flick-on header or long-range drive. It’s fantasy and wish fulfilment that’s accessible to anyone, no matter how uncoordinated.
ISS Pro Evolution – Several prior games had flirted with the idea of simulating football rather than just making an arcade game resembling the sport, but this is the first one that actually did it. Never have nil-nil draws been so exciting. Slow-paced and tactical, it wowed critics and helped set in motion a decade-long transformation of the genre.
LMA Manager – All the depth of a football management game, with all of the instant gratification and approachability of a console game. LMA unified computer and console design sensibilities with fantastic, highly-legible menus and a clever navigation system built around the shoulder buttons.
UEFA Champions League 2006/2007 – The ultimate team mode debuted here. It’s kind of gimmicky, this idea of wrapping a collectible card game around a fantasy team that you can play with in matches, but, outside of the Football Manager series, it’s become the dominant way people play football games now. It has also, rather cynically, become a great way for publishers to make more money.
- Design disciplines in this article