Anco Software
Kick Off, and what happens when you change the view
A Kent publisher whose 1989 football game was still being called the greatest of all time by an Italian magazine eight years later — and whose sequel proved the point by getting it wrong.
Anco published unremarkable 8-bit games for most of the eighties. Then in 1989 it released Dino Dini’s Kick Off, and became the publisher of the football game against which every other football game was measured for the next decade.
Fast facts
- Press evidence in this library: 8-bit titles in ZZAP!64 from 1987 (Thai Boxing, Winter Events, Magic Madness), then the Kick Off series across the Amiga press to 1994.
- The series: Kick Off (1989), Kick Off 2, Player Manager, Kick Off 3 (1994, £26, A1200, by Steve Screech).
- Reach: Kick Off is one of the most heavily discussed games in this reference library, and the discussion is not only British.
The ball is not stuck to your feet
Kick Off is viewed from above, and its central decision is that the ball is a separate object from the player. Run with it and it travels ahead of you; you are chasing it as much as carrying it. Every other football game of the era glued the ball to the player’s boot, which makes the controls obedient and makes the game not football.
That one choice produced everything else: the speed, the difficulty, the need to learn to trap and turn, and the frantic loose-ball scrambles that its critics called pinball and its players called the whole point. It made Kick Off hard to pick up and enormously deep once you had, which is precisely the profile of a game people play for ten years.
Eight years later, in Italian
Anco is here partly to make a point about where this library’s evidence comes from.
In April 1997, the Italian magazine Zeta opened its Kick Off 3 review by noting that eight long years had passed since Dini’s first Kick Off, and that the fame of “il più insigne gioco di calcio di tutti i tempi” — the most distinguished football game of all time — showed no sign of rusting.
That is an Italian magazine, in Italian, still treating a British Amiga game as the benchmark most of a decade on. Kick Off had a competitive scene in Italy and the Netherlands that outlasted the machine it ran on. A history assembled only from British magazines would record the game and miss the fact that its centre of gravity had moved abroad.
Kick Off 3
Amiga Power reviewed Kick Off 3 in August 1994 — one page, which the magazine pointedly said was “an excellent pointer to the importance we attach to the game” — and its verdict identifies the mistake exactly. The new game “successfully defeats the ‘pinball’ feel of the previous games”, switching to a side-on view, and AP recommended a competitor instead.
Defeating the pinball feel was the failure. The uncontrollable ball was not a flaw the series had been carrying for five years; it was the design. A sequel that fixes the defining characteristic has nothing left that made anyone want the original.
Named in the press
Worth pinning down, because the entry above turns on one game and one design decision.
The Hungarian magazine 576 KByte, reviewing Kick Off 2 in April 1990, credits it to “az ANCO cég és DINO DINI” — the Anco company and Dino Dini — and scores the Amiga version 83 for graphics against the C64’s 66. The reviewer’s verdict is the one that matters: even losing constantly against the computer, “the excellent handling and versatility” mean you do not lose interest.
The same magazine catches Anco trying to repeat the trick in December 1991 with Tip Off, described as wanting to be “the Kick Off of basketball games”.
That is the shape of a studio with one genuinely new idea: the idea gets a sequel, then gets ported to another sport, and the question of whether it survives the transfer is the whole story.
The 8-bit record
CRASH’s issue 48 index covers Anco’s Spectrum releases and shows a company that was publishing years before anyone had heard of it:
| Game | Score | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| The Kingdom of Krell | 86% | 39 |
| Chuckman | 79% | 4 |
| Zapper | 64% | 8 |
Zapper and Chuckman are from 1984. Anco was six years old when Kick Off made its name — a useful corrective to the impression that it appeared fully formed on the Amiga.
Why it mattered
Anco is a single design decision carrying a franchise — and a lesson in how sequels lose things nobody thought to write down as features.
It is also a reminder that British games had continental lives their home press never covered. The Kick Off community’s centre was in Italy and the Netherlands, and the sources that record it are not in English.