Dino Dini wrote Kick Off, the football game that set the standard on the Atari ST and Amiga at the end of the 1980s, and by his own account he had not studied anyone else’s. “I did not play other football games, so no other football games had an influence,” he told Retro Gamer in 2004. In 1993 he went further and told CU Amiga that he did not play football or support a team, and had made Kick Off because Anco asked him for a football game. The game he wrote let the ball run loose from the players’ feet, and the series built on it made Anco’s name. Four years later the two parted, and Dini’s next football game came out from Virgin.
Fast facts
- First computers: an Acorn System One, an Acorn Atom, then a BBC Micro.
- With Anco: Kick Off (1989), the Extra Time data disk, Player Manager (1990), Kick Off 2 (1990) and its data disks.
- With Virgin: Goal! (1993), released on the Mega Drive as Dino Dini’s Soccer.
- Later: Three Lions (1998) in the United States; lecturer in game programming at NHTV Breda in the Netherlands from 2009; Kick Off Revival (2016).
Before Kick Off
Dini told The One in 1991 that the BBC Micro was his first games computer, “but before then I had an Acorn Atom and even before that an Acorn System One”. He wrote a couple of games on the BBC that were never published, then went to university. When he talked to the magazine he had spent several years working on an Atari ST, and Kick Off began there: “Kick Off was originally written for ST, and then ported to Amiga,” he said in 2004.
Kick Off
Kick Off came out in 1989 from Anco, a publisher that until then, as Retro Gamer put it, “had just a handful of middling Commodore 64 games to its credit”. It showed the pitch from above with small, fast players, and its “big novelty”, in Retro Gamer’s words, “being that the ball didn’t stick to your feet”. Players had to learn to run with the ball, trap it and turn with it, and a loose ball could go anywhere. ZZAP! gave the Amiga version 96% in June 1989 and said it “boots all other Amiga football sims over the crossbar”. Amiga Action later called it “the surprise hit of last year”, programmed “by a relative unknown called Dino Dini and supervised by Anco’s MD”, Anil Gupta.
Anco and Dini followed it quickly. By December 1989 The One reported that the Extra Time data disk and a management game were both “in the capable hands of Dino Dini”. That game, Player Manager (1990), put the player in charge of a Third Division club as its player-manager, with the Kick Off match engine underneath. A reader told The Games Machine in 1990 that Dini “should get a knighthood”.
Kick Off 2
Kick Off 2 appeared in the summer of 1990. ZZAP! found “optional aftertouch” and set-piece free kicks with “before- and aftertouch allowing infinite variety”. Amiga Action described the new banana shot, made “by shooting as normal, but using the joystick to add curve”, along with walls, injuries, substitutions, weather that slowed the players on a wet pitch, and 24 referees who “bandy yellow cards around like there’s no tomorrow”. Its reviewer thought the sequel “twice as good as the first game”. In 1992 Amiga Format, still treating Kick Off as “the one to beat”, noted that Kick Off 2 had added “Aftertouch for banana shots”. It won 16-bit Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards in 1991.
The speed that made the game also drew the main complaint. Its detractors, Retro Gamer recalled, “argued it was so fast and zippy, it was more a game of pinball than a game of football”. When Sensible Software set out to beat it with Sensible Soccer, Jon Hare named the part that annoyed him: running to the ball, missing it and having to go back for it.
Leaving Anco
In late 1991 Dini was working on Player Manager 2 and Kick Off 3 for Anco. Early in 1993 the magazines reported that he had gone. AMIGA POWER said he had been working on Kick Off 3 for Anco, “now he’s not. Now he’s working for Virgin Games”. CU Amiga reported that Virgin had signed him, that Anco kept the rights to the name Kick Off, that his new game had been meant to appear as Kick Off 3, and that neither side was available for comment.
Dini gave his side to Retro Gamer in 2004. Kick Off, he said, “already was a franchise, and Anco exploited it in all manner of ways for which I got no reward. I wanted to create a new game that improved upon Kick Off by adding more depth and removing some of the shortcoming of the original game. This eventually became Goal!” Asked about the Kick Off and Player Manager games made since, he said: “I have not played any of them. From what I hear they are by and large terrible.”
Goal!
Virgin published Goal! in 1993, at £30.99. Dini told CU Amiga that he had listened to the complaint about “manic pinball”. “The aim of Goal! is to make it more accessible at the beginning. But because there’s a greater depth to the game it means that it is difficult to master.” It had larger players, a pitch that scrolled across the screen instead of up it, and computer players that could take the ball from in front of an opponent without a sliding tackle. AMIGA POWER’s preview ended “the boy Dini’s done good”, and in June 1993 the magazine billed its review as “Dino Dini versus Sensible Soccer”. Retro Gamer was cooler in 2004, recalling a “lukewarm response”. On the Mega Drive the game became Dino Dini’s Soccer, with a four-player mode. “The core engine was converted in seven weeks,” Dini said.
He did not hide what he thought of Sensible Soccer. It had, he told Retro Gamer, invaded “my patch”, and he took it “as both a compliment and a kick in the teeth”. Its makers had learned from what he had done, “which is why I say that, in this sense, I am also the father of Sensible Soccer”.
Later career
Public sources say Dini moved to the United States in 1996 to direct Three Lions (1998) for Z-Axis, then returned to Britain and set up his own company. In 2004 Retro Gamer reported that he had teamed up with the developer DC Studios on a new football game for PCs, consoles and handhelds; public sources say it was not released. From 2009 he taught game programming at NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, according to public sources.
He came back to the series in 2016 with Dino Dini’s Kick Off Revival for the PlayStation 4, followed by a PlayStation Vita version. Public sources record that reviewers received it very badly.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 4, 2004: football games feature (Kick Off, Player Manager, Kick Off 2, the split, Goal!, Kick Off 3), and interview with Dino Dini (influences, the ST original, Anco and the franchise, Sensible Soccer, Dino Dini’s Soccer, the later sequels).
- CU Amiga, March 1993: Goal! preview by Jon Sloan (Dini on football, the pinball complaint and the new game) and news of his move to Virgin.
- The One issue 36, September 1991, “Desert Island Disks”: Dini’s first computers and unpublished BBC games.
- ZZAP! issue 50, June 1989: Amiga Kick Off review, 96%.
- Amiga Action issue 11, August 1990: Kick Off 2 review (Dini, Anil Gupta, the banana shot, referees, walls, weather).
- ZZAP! issue 64, August 1990, pp. 76–77: Kick Off 2 review (aftertouch).
- The One issue 15, December 1989: Extra Time and Player Manager in progress.
- The Games Machine issue 34, September 1990: readers’ letter on Player Manager.
- Amiga Format issue 36, July 1992: football round-up (Kick Off 2’s aftertouch).
- ACE issue 46, July 1991, and CU Amiga, December 1991: Player Manager 2 and Kick Off 3 in progress.
- AMIGA POWER issue 23, March 1993: Goal preview by Gary Penn. Issue 26, June 1993: Goal! (Virgin, £30.99) and cover.
- Amiga Format issue 44, March 1993: Dini’s signing to Virgin and the new game’s name.
- Retro Gamer issue 6, 2004: Dini and DC Studios.
- Wikipedia, “Dino Dini” (web, secondary): date of birth, Three Lions and Z-Axis, the DC Studios game, NHTV Breda, Kick Off Revival and its reception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dino_Dini
- Wikipedia, “Kick Off (series)” (web, secondary): Kick Off Revival on PlayStation 4 (2016) and Vita (2017). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kick_Off_(series)