Foreword

The personal computer Commodore 64 was really popular at early 80s in the United States, and also in Europe. Amongst the sports titles it was a logical step to start with videogames popular, or at least known, in both countries. The first try of the company Commodore was to develop a videogame for its own personal computer, of Football (known as Soccer in North America), called International Soccer, which had a bit of success at the time. And yes, we can consider this game as a predecessor for another game we have already written about, I’m tempted to recycle parts of that other entry.

Game

The videogame features simple graphics, but we have to consider there were the first years of the computer, the virtual footballers are a bit tall for the field and the animation is quite fluid. In what became a standard in this kind of games, the virtual footballer controlled by the human player has a different color from the rest of the team. Which in fact, there are only 6, not 11 like a real-life football match.

An issue, at least to me, is that the color selection is quite limited, and it’s very easy to reach a situation where the human controlled footballer has the same color than the entire rival team.

With the Joystick it’s possible to move in the virtual field, and with the fire button you can pass the ball to another teammate, or to the rival goal. Steal the ball is easy when the uman controlled player touch the ball, even if the rival has it, but if you tackle it, you got called a foul. To me, the game has a tendency to call more fouls favouring the human controlled team, but probably is for the difficult level I used.

It’s possible to adjust the game options, this can be achieved by pressing the following keys in the computer:

Key	Action
F1 or F3	Change colors being the left or right team.
F5	Difficulty level of the Artificial Intelligence managed team. Goes from 1 (easiest) to 9 (hardest).

We recommend to rookie videoplayers, set the rival’s team at either 3 or 4, because with lesser values it’s really easy to win, and greater values, the Artificial Intelligence it’s too hard. Even for the time, it’s incredible that the difficulty increases gradually, a feature not very frequent at the time, where changes were sharper.

When the match finishes, a cheerleader appears to give a trophy to the winning team. A funny touch relatively unseen in videogames at the time.

Epilogue

Really funny game, for a quick football association match, and it’s tempting to increase the rival’s level to see how far can you perform, but it does not give something extraordinary to the genre. It was really popular at the time and appears in the first pages of the outstanding book Commodore 64 A Visual Compendium from Bitmap Books.

References

Sport Icon designed by Smashicons of FlatIcon licensed by CC 3.0 BY.

Console Icon taken from Retroarch.