Steve Screech
The one who had to follow Kick Off
Programmer of Kick Off 3 — the sequel that changed the series' defining feature and lost it, in a case study of what happens when you inherit somebody else's franchise.
Amiga Power’s review header for Kick Off 3 is short: “Publisher: Anco. Author: Steve Screech. Runs on: A1200. Price: £26.” Screech took over the most argued-about football series on the Amiga after Dino Dini had left it, and the reception is the most instructive part of his entry.
Fast facts
- Programmed: Kick Off 3 (1994) for Anco, on A1200, at £26.
- Named in: Amiga Power, and in the Italian press, which followed the series closely.
- The Italian magazine Zeta notes he took up the routines that made the earlier games successful.
Inheriting a franchise
Kick Off’s defining feature was that the ball is not stuck to the player’s feet. That made it hard, fast and deep, and its critics called the result pinball.
Kick Off 3 moved to a side-on view and fixed that. Amiga Power’s verdict is precise about what happened: the game “successfully defeats the ‘pinball’ feel of the previous games” — and the magazine then recommended a competitor instead.
The trap is a general one and worth naming. A franchise’s most-criticised characteristic is often the same thing as its most-loved one, seen from outside. The people who complain are usually not the people who buy it. Fixing the complaint can remove the reason anyone was there, and a programmer inheriting somebody else’s series is the person most likely to be told to do exactly that.
Reviewed in one page
Amiga Power also made its opinion clear structurally before saying a word. The review runs to one page, and the magazine says so: that is “an excellent pointer to the importance we attach to the game”, adding that it “was hardly awaited with” enthusiasm.
There is a piece of publisher behaviour recorded alongside it. AP reports that Anco held review copies back, having “decided that the computer press couldn’t be trusted not to copy the game and distribute it to their piratey friends” — a delay the magazine treated with open sarcasm.
That is worth keeping as evidence about the period’s press-publisher relationship. A magazine confident enough to print that, about a publisher it depended on for advertising, is a magazine whose scores meant something.
Continental attention
The Italian magazine Zeta reviewed the PC version in 1997, eight years after the first Kick Off, still treating the series as the benchmark and noting that Screech had built on the routines behind the original’s success.
That is the second time the Anco story leaves Britain. The Kick Off community’s centre of gravity was in Italy and the Netherlands, and its judgement of the sequel was recorded there long after the British press had lost interest.
Why he matters
Screech drew inheriting a franchise, one of the least sympathetic jobs in games: the previous author’s decisions are the thing people love, changing them is what you were hired to do, and either way the comparison is not with your work.