In 2002 Edge explained why Konami’s football games kept losing to EA’s in the shops: fans hated “seeing goals scored by Brazil’s never-fielded ‘Roberto Larcos’”. Without the licences, Konami could not use the real names of many of the world’s players, and fans had to put up with made-up ones or type in the real names themselves. The games sold anyway, on how they played. Pro Evolution Soccer, made in Tokyo and sold as Winning Eleven in Japan, became the football game that critics and many players preferred to FIFA, even while FIFA outsold it.
Fast facts
- Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo (KCET), part of Konami.
- Producer: Shingo “Seabass” Takatsuka.
- First game: J.League Winning Eleven, PlayStation, Japan, 1995.
- European names: ISS Pro and ISS Pro Evolution on the PlayStation; Pro Evolution Soccer from November 2001, starting on the PlayStation 2.
- Now: eFootball, free to play, since 2021.
Two Konami football teams
Konami had two football teams, and their games are easy to mix up. Its Osaka studio made International Superstar Soccer for the Super Nintendo. That began in Japan as Perfect Eleven, and SuperPlay reported in 1994 that it was being converted for the West under the new name. Its Tokyo studio made Winning Eleven. The Australian magazine Hyper explained the split in 2002: the Osaka team were “the original ISS designers”, and the Tokyo team were “the makers of the more realistic Evolution games that have recently branched off into Pro Evolution Soccer”. In Europe both series used the ISS name for a while, which added to the confusion.
J.League Winning Eleven came out on the PlayStation in Japan in 1995 with 14 J.League teams and 120,000 copies pre-ordered. Edge thought its angular, part-textured players looked “rudimentary” next to other football games in development, but praised the controls. Dribbling, passing and shooting “soon become instinctive”, it said, and “a huge variety of goal-scoring techniques rewards experimentation”. It gave the game seven out of ten.
Pro Evolution Soccer
The series reached the PlayStation 2 as Pro Evolution Soccer in November 2001. Play’s review described it as a KCET game and pointed to the extra teams players could unlock, including classic sides and, by winning the Master League, a roster of old stars.
The Master League was the series’ long-form mode, in which the player took charge of a club and built up its squad over many seasons. In Winning Eleven 6 it had three divisions, and every new club started in the bottom one. When Official PlayStation 2 Magazine in Australia played the Japanese Winning Eleven 6 in 2002, the improved Master League was one of the headlines. The magazine also interviewed the series producer, Shingo “Seabass” Takatsuka, who said that for Konami’s football games “we have not reached a satisfaction level. There are a lot of things we wanted to do for our soccer games which we haven’t accomplished yet.”
The licence problem
Licences were the one thing FIFA had that Konami’s series lacked. The same Australian magazine expected the Master League and many national teams to stay unlicensed, “so there’ll be no proper player names for the majority of the teams”. The game’s Edit mode let players fix that themselves, typing in the right names and building their own clubs, kits and badges. “The official suit-and-tie version of videogame football is likely to remain in EA’s FIFA-branded hands,” it concluded, “but do we really care about authentic names when there’s such an engaging game to hand?”
Edge‘s feature on licences agreed that Konami had been “long making superior playing football games” and “generally been outsold by EA’s FIFA titles” all the same. It thought Pro Evolution Soccer on the PlayStation 2 had done better against EA, helped by a new licensing deal with FIFPro, the international players’ union.
FIFA and Pro Evolution
People inside the industry had noticed the gap between quality and sales long before. In 1999 Karl Hilton of Free Radical Design told Edge that he thought International Superstar Soccer 64, the Osaka team’s Nintendo 64 game, “far better” than FIFA, “but you read the sales figures and you find out that FIFA sold four times as many”. In January 2003 Edge’s columnist RedEye claimed that Pro Evolution Soccer 2 had beaten FIFA in its first week of sales on the PlayStation 2. By 2004 Pro Evolution Soccer 4 was the fifth best-selling game of the year in Britain, and according to Edge, PES 6 sold a million copies in four days in 2006. For PES 2008, Konami’s advertising used Michael Owen and Cristiano Ronaldo.
The next console generation went less well. Reviewing PES 2010 in 2009, Edge found it “comes up short” against FIFA’s “fluidity and possibility”. It noted that Takatsuka had admitted the game’s new 360-degree dribbling was brought forward only after EA announced the same feature for FIFA 10, and called the game “an ageing engine pushed too far”. Some of the old magic survived: beating a defender was “still enormously gratifying”, and the Master League was still one of the series’ strengths. By 2013, when Edge visited the team working on the next game with Konami’s Fox Engine, Takatsuka was “conspicuous by his absence”.
eFootball
In 2021 Konami dropped the Pro Evolution Soccer name. Its replacement, eFootball, was free to play and built as a service, with more features and teams to follow after launch. Wireframe called it “an interesting experiment for the genre”, and the same magazine noted that it offered the same features on phones as on consoles. As the Konami entry records, the launch went badly: players found it full of bugs, and within a day it had become the worst-reviewed game on Steam.
Sources
- SuperPlay issue 25, November 1994: Perfect Eleven being converted for the West as International Superstar Soccer.
- Nintendo Magazine System issue 26, November 1994: International Superstar Soccer preview (UK release set for January 1995).
- Edge issue 25, October 1995, p. 64: J.League Winning Eleven review (PlayStation, Konami in-house, ¥5,800, 120,000 pre-orders, 14 J.League teams, seven out of ten).
- Edge issue 72, June 1999: interview with Free Radical Design (Karl Hilton on FIFA and ISS 64).
- Play issue 83, October 2001: Pro Evolution Soccer review (PlayStation 2; KCET; release 23 November 2001; unlockable teams and the Master League).
- Hyper issue 104, June 2002, p. 66: ISS 2 review, on Konami’s Osaka and Tokyo football teams.
- Official PlayStation 2 Magazine (Australia) issue 5, August 2002, pp. 14–16: Winning Eleven 6 import review (KCE Tokyo; Master League; Edit mode; unlicensed teams) and Q&A with Shingo “Seabass” Takatsuka.
- Edge issue 113, August 2002: feature on licences (“Roberto Larcos”; Konami outsold by FIFA; the FIFPro deal).
- Edge issue 119, January 2003: RedEye column on Pro Evolution Soccer 2 and FIFA.
- Edge issue 146, February 2005: the UK’s best-selling games of 2004 (Pro Evolution Soccer 4 fifth).
- Edge issue 183, Christmas 2007: Christmas marketing feature (PES 6 sales in 2006; the PES 2008 campaign).
- Edge issue 208, December 2009, p. 97: PES 2010 review.
- Edge issue 252, April 2013, p. 79: visit to the Pro Evolution Soccer team (Fox Engine; Takatsuka absent).
- Wireframe issue 54, August 2021, p. 27: eFootball (formerly PES 2022) as a free-to-play service; issue 56, October 2021: eFootball on phones.
- PCGamesN, “Konami promises fixes as eFootball 2022 becomes the worst-reviewed game on Steam”, 1 October 2021 (web, secondary). https://www.pcgamesn.com/efootball-2022/steam-reviews