Sport was one of the first things video games imitated. The Magnavox Odyssey of 1972 could draw little more than “a line down the middle to indicate the net, and paddles and balls”, in its designer Ralph Baer’s words, and that autumn Atari put its first Pong machine, a game of table tennis, into the arcades. Since then sports games have worked out most of the ways a computer can stand in for a stadium: as a test of reflexes, a spreadsheet of statistics, a manager’s office, or a television broadcast.
Paddles and balls
Baer had worked out his TV games at Sanders Associates in the 1960s. The Odyssey’s hardware was about 40 transistors and a pile of diodes, he said, with plastic overlays on the screen for the court markings because anything more was too expensive, and no on-screen scoring. Baer always held that Pong was “a derivative of Odyssey, not the other way around”, because someone from Atari had seen the Odyssey during 1972.
Sport on the early consoles
When programmable consoles arrived, sport was how Mattel chose to sell the Intellivision. Electronic Games summed up the market in March 1982: “Atari specialized in arcade-style games, Intellivision emphasized sports simulations.” It also explained why. To make Breakout and Missile Command look right, Atari had “traded high resolution graphics for faster on-screen movement”; Mattel “made the opposite choice as a result of its decision to concentrate on athletics as the subject of most of its cartridges”. Mattel’s advertisements, fronted by the writer George Plimpton, put its baseball and soccer screens beside Atari’s (see the Intellivision entry).
The same issue’s awards show how quickly the genre split. Its best sports game was Mattel’s USAC Auto Racing, with cars that “look—and steer—like cars”. Activision’s Tennis won a mention because its angled court lifted it above “the typical pong-style tennis games”. And the best computer sports game was SSI’s Computer Baseball, a statistical simulation for players who had run baseball leagues with dice and cards for 30 years; its merit was that “all the complicated play mechanics are buried in the computer, where they belong”.
Waggle and bash
In the arcades the most copied sports game was Konami’s Track & Field (1983). “All over the western world one arcade game dominated the summer,” Your Computer wrote in January 1984: it “could be found in pubs, clubs and railway buffets everywhere.” Players ran by hammering the run buttons as fast as they could and pressed another to jump or throw. For its MSX version Konami sold the Hyper Shot, a pair of big buttons that saved the reviewer “from totally destroying my stock of joysticks”. Its sequel Hyper Sports was, in Personal Computer Games’ words, “button bashing to wake the dead”.
Home computers had joysticks rather than buttons, so British programmers made the player waggle instead. In Ocean’s Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (1984) “the most gruelling part”, Commodore Computing International found, “was waggling the joystick from side to side”, and CRASH chose it to test joysticks for that reason: “we found they had to be built to survive”. In America, Epyx timed Summer Games for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, with national anthems and an opening ceremony, and followed it with Winter Games and California Games.
Britain and football
British players took football more seriously than any other sport, and in three different ways. Kevin Toms’s Football Manager (1982) left the pitch out altogether and made the player the manager. Ocean’s Match Day (1984) put a whole match on the Spectrum. Then Dino Dini’s Kick Off (Anco, 1989) looked down on the pitch from above and let the ball run free of the players’ feet, so that every touch had to be controlled. “Until you learn to trap it’s impossible to make much progress,” Dini warned The One at its launch. Even its sixteen referees had their own personalities, some stricter about fouls than others.
Sensible Software’s Sensible Soccer began, as CU Amiga put it, as the idea of a “Kick Off beater”. Amiga Format called it “the Kick Off of 1992” before it was even finished, and Amiga Power led with “Kick Off eat your heart out!” (see Dino Dini and Jon Hare for the rivalry’s people).
Licences and the yearly update
Electronic Arts took the genre in another direction. It announced John Madden Football for the Apple II at $44.95 in 1988 and shipped it in 1989, with a famous commentator’s name on the box. On Sega’s Mega Drive it dressed its sports games up as television, with “spectacular camera angles”, instant replays and a sportscaster, Ron Barr. Its sports label was first called the EA Sports Network, until the cable channel ESPN objected that the logo looked too much like its own; in the settlement reported in March 1993, EA renamed the label EA Sports and agreed to advertise on ESPN. FIFA International Soccer, developed by Extended Play for the Mega Drive, reached British shops that December.
The FIFA games became a new edition every season, numbered by year, and the licence itself became something worth fighting over. When EA’s agreement with FIFA ended on 31 December 2022, the series carried on without the name as EA Sports FC, starting with EA Sports FC 24 in September 2023.
Sources
- Video Games, vol. 1 no. 5, February 1983, pp. 24 and 81: interview with Ralph Baer (the Odyssey’s hardware, overlays and “paddles and balls”, its 1972 sales, Pong in the autumn of 1972, “a derivative of Odyssey”).
- Electronic Games, vol. 1 no. 2, March 1982: p. 23 (Atari and arcade games, Intellivision and sports simulations); pp. 48–49, Arcade Awards (USAC Auto Racing, Activision’s Tennis, Computer Baseball); p. 68 (the VCS and Intellivision graphics trade-off).
- Your Computer, January 1984, p. 18: review of Konami’s Hyper Olympics for MSX (Track and Field in “pubs, clubs and railway buffets”, the Hyper Shot).
- Personal Computer Games, October 1984, p. 103, “Arcade Angle”: Hyper Sports.
- Commodore Computing International, vol. 3 no. 4, October 1984: review of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (“waggling the joystick from side to side”).
- CRASH, issue 10, November 1984, p. 88: Daley Thompson’s Decathlon competition, the joystick test.
- Sega Visions, February 1993, p. 11: EA Sports advertisement for NHLPA Hockey ’93 (camera angles, sportscaster Ron Barr, instant replay).
- The One, issue 10, July 1989, p. 55: Dino Dini’s tips for Kick Off (trapping the ball, the sixteen referees).
- CU Amiga, May 1992, p. 49; Amiga Format, issue 34, May 1992, cover; Amiga Power, issue 13, May 1992, p. 41: Sensible Soccer and Kick Off.
- Compute!, vol. 10 no. 4, April 1988, p. 15: John Madden Football (Apple II, $44.95) announced by Electronic Arts.
- Compute!’s Gazette vol. 8 no. 5, May 1990, p. 22: Robin Antonick, “we shipped the first Apple version in 1989”.
- Amazing Computing, vol. 8 no. 3, March 1993, p. 74, and K (Italy), no. 48, March 1993, p. 8: the EA Sports Network logo dispute with ESPN and the new EA Sports name.
- Edge, issue 3, December 1993, p. 96: FIFA International Soccer (Mega Drive, EA, developed by Extended Play, UK release December).
- “EA Sports FC”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the end of the FIFA licence on 31 December 2022 and the release of EA Sports FC 24 on 29 September 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EA_Sports_FC