The thought may have occurred to some of our regular readers, as they plough through another 3/10 review of an absolutely ancient football game on this site, that trawling this particular section of the retro-gaming ocean is a largely pointless task, in service of a rather niche interest, the only source of enthusiasm for which is the author himself.

But, no, you fools! It seems I was right all along, as Bitmap Books recently brought out a heavy, glossy, heftily-priced hardback book on this exact topic. As you might expect, I immediately made sure I owned a copy of A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games, 1982-2010. In some ways, it’s a book I would have loved to have written myself.

Picture: Bitmap Books

2010 makes perfect sense as an end date: it was probably the point at which the final boiling down of all competition left us with two giants that cornered the market: FIFA and Football Manager. My experience of both since 2010 has been limited but they are, by all accounts, very high-quality franchises.

It’s very easy to romanticise the past, and my memory of football games – or those that offered on-pitch action, anyway – in the 90s and early 00s was that the situation was vaguely akin to living in a town with no decent takeaways. There was plenty of choice, and some options might have occasionally satisfied, but something would always be a bit ‘off’ that meant you couldn’t really enjoy the whole thing as intended.

‘Fancy some computer football/curry tonight?’ you’d say. ‘How about World League Soccer ‘98/Kashmir Garden? It’s got great headers and volleys/Onion Bhajis.’ ‘Yeah, but the players look ridiculous/they put grated cheddar in the saag paneer that time.’

Or to put it another way – one that actually makes sense – if you’d told me, or indeed most gamers back in the day, as we cycled through a roster of unsatisfactory titles in search of fun, that one day the ultimate football game would exist, one that was not only great out on the pitch, but had all of the official licenses that money could buy, we would have said that was exactly what we wanted.

And yet. After FIFA established supremacy, even to a reluctant Pro Evo holdout like myself, I was somehow unable to warm to the experience, while still acknowledging the action as superior to Konami’s rival, which I also occasionally revisited as it continued to lose ground for the rest of the decade. The 00s, even as it devolved into a two-horse race, was the last ‘have a go’ generation: as long as FIFA, with all of its financial backing and official licences, still wasn’t the best game, there seemed room for others to enter the market.

A Tale of Two Halves goes back much further, though, to a time when anyone and everyone could make a football game, and when football itself was a much less glamorous and well-paid profession. It’s an impressive piece of work, covering over 400 games – and that’s a number that isn’t bulked out by multiple annual instalments of high-profile franchises, sensibly dealt with in batches here – including those released on computers and consoles, not only in the UK and Japan but in Germany, Spain and Poland, too.

And yes, it even covers the elusive Puma World Football 98, although it appears as Sean Dundee’s World Club Football here, and earns grudging praise as a ‘well-made, enjoyable final runout for the old side-on 2D perspective’.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s unlikely that the author, Richard Moss, has played anything close to all of the games featured, which makes it hard to know on what basis the appraisals are made. Understandably, given the task at hand, he treats the bulky mass of extremely dry management games with some generosity, noting that while UK gamers may generally have preferred Championship/Football Manager, other games and approaches were also successful elsewhere.

(There’s an argument to be had about whether the non-playing/commercial side of things have any place in a game where you’re managing the team: my own feelings matched those of PC Zone, which would dish out high scores to Championship Manager and relegate the rest to brief reviews and low to middling scores. Indeed, FFG’s only foray into this territory is a review of FIFA Soccer Manager, a game during which it’s possible to be fired for personally authorising the building of a huge new stadium stand that the club could never afford.)

We oldie reviewers possibly all like to think of ourselves as studious historians of gaming, charting a course through the past and observing key moments along the way. But these lofty ambitions often clash with the reality of the situation, which is that such an approach isn’t really consistent with why we play and enjoy games in the first place. Going through, for example, all of the King’s Quest games in order and in rapid succession sounds like the right thing for an adventure game fan to do, but there’s a reason that we’ve never come close to doing it.

For most of us, gaming history is, to reuse an old phrase, incomplete and subjective: What did you remember? What did you always want to try out but never did? What did you never want to touch with a bargepole? Even before FIFA/EAFC, there were always genre leaders: Match Day, Sensible Soccer, International Superstar Soccer, Pro Evolution Soccer, etc.

But people did play other games and found something to enjoy in them. When I think of old footy games, I don’t just think of marathon Pro Evo sessions or days lost to Championship Manager, but of being hunched over a friend’s Spectrum playing Footballer of the Year, or doing a summer job with some lads who didn’t like real life sport but for some reason were really into This Is Football, Sony’s third place player that briefly challenged in the early to mid 00s. And yes, I also think of being a nerdy teenager playing Puma World Football, the game that no one else had heard of.

By doing the hard yards to document absolutely everything – for all that this is an area of great personal interest, there are many titles of various generations featured here that completely escaped my attention at the time – A Tale of Two Halves ensures that everyone’s favoured game of any particular moment is likely to have been captured, however briefly. Anyone enraptured by an imperfect or idiosyncratic football game of the past will find something to enjoy here.

—

A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games, 1982-2010 is published by Bitmap Books and costs £34.99.