Retro Football Games

Sensible Soccer (and SWOS) and Football Manager, Match Day and Match Day 2, ISS Pro Evo, PES, Winning Eleven, FIFA, Kick Off, Kick Off 2 and Player Manager for starters.

Super Soccer on the Speccy. Tried to be Match Day 3 but didn't really work, pitch was huge and the power bar didn't quite make for the gameplay you'd hope for.

Kick Off 2 Extra Time, and add on disks "The Final Whistle" (awesome potentially freaky wind, more pitch types etc) were both great but the "European Cups" thing (Giants of Europe and Return to Europe, apparently) - was KO2 but with weird badly wrong away goals rule. Good selection of teams though.

Footballer of the Year by Gremlin...

The Official FA Cup game - play as any of the 130-ish teams including some token non-League ones. Must have come out around 1987/88 as Newport County were still on it. A completely tedious "Cup draw and random results generator" game which trudged through every single round and every single draw and every single result via vidiprinter until someone won the cup. Took hours, no vague clue why or how results were calculated either, but there was clearly some kind of ranking involved along with a random element (see "questions" below). Yoinks, not the best.

So, now you'll have to be creative in your memories... Go.

I used to have a game for the speccy called Tracksuit manager. It was international football management and it was in the era of players like Paul Mariner. You actually had quite a huge amount of possible players to select the England team from, probably everybody in division 1 at the time and they had a good list of various attributes. In theory it was a brilliant management sim with a pretty decent match commentary too.

The problem was it made you sit through every single international match while it calculated the results, not just your own, for every nation. it took ****ing ages and you couldn't just walk away and let it finish working out the results, you had to press enter after each one. The idea was brilliant for footie management simulators t the time but the gameplay was painful.

I remember for some reason Chile were far and away the best team in the world.

It's the sort of game that would still be okay if they made it run at a decent speed and cut out all of the waiting. Well, okay, it would be ****.

My favoritist retro football game has to be Goal, the unofficial sequel to Kick Off 2, on the Amiga. Brilliant top down football game that combined all the good points from Kick Off 2 and Sensi Soccer. I played it for hours and hours.

Mine isn't as old as these but the fifa that had the indoor football, think it was fifa 97. Man did I lose a lot of my childhood to that game.

Footballer of the Year was a sensational game. Loved it.

Emlyn Hughes International was a great game on the Amstrad too.

the first football game i ever owned was Greame Souness' International Soccer on the NES

Mine isn't as old as these but the fifa that had the indoor football, think it was fifa 97. Man did I lose a lot of my childhood to that game.

ye it was '97, that game was quality, and le tiss was awsome in it

i much prefer the old fifa extras compared with todays card trading system and the emphasis on online, fifa 98 world to world cup was also wicked being able to go through the whole qualifying with the real groups, and then world cup '98 had all the WC finals set up to play, unfortunately u couldn't play '70 Brazil vs '94 Brazil.

Pah! Football games didn`t start with the computer age!! We used to play this, and we loved it!

http://www.vintagetoysgames.co.uk/wembley_board_game_1960s.html

...and this one. Really liked this. Wasn`t just luck. Involved strategy!

http://www.oldfootballgames.co.uk/index.asp?pageid=124080

Sensible Soccer on the Mega Drive, awesome. Downloaded it via Xbox live and it just doesn't feel right on the Xbox controller.

My favoritist retro football game has to be Goal, the unofficial sequel to Kick Off 2, on the Amiga. Brilliant top down football game that combined all the good points from Kick Off 2 and Sensi Soccer. I played it for hours and hours.

Very much agree

Sensible soccer around 1994 was amazing

Many times used to run down the win, cut in and curl the ball into the far top corner

Or cross one in and dive head the ball in

Ultimate Soccer Manager. Excellent, you could chuck bungs at people and build and see your stadium / training ground grow as you design it.

My favoritist retro football game has to be Goal, the unofficial sequel to Kick Off 2, on the Amiga. Brilliant top down football game that combined all the good points from Kick Off 2 and Sensi Soccer. I played it for hours and hours.

See, now I could not get on with Goal! It just zoomed in and out all the wrong times etc. Glitchy too.

Sensible Soccer on the Mega Drive, awesome. Downloaded it via Xbox live and it just doesn't feel right on the Xbox controller.

I absolutely hated Sensi on the MegaDrive, but I found it completely unplayable with any kind of + pad joypad to be honest. Much easier for me on the Xbox controller due to the analogue joystick things being much more like a joystick than the 4-way button Megadrive controller.

Anyway, everyone bangs on about Sensi, I thought it was hugely overrated even on the Amiga to be honest, much better playing it as a non-playing pseudo management sim using SWOS and jumping clubs around Europe all the time. Never did manage Hearts of Oak in Ghana though.

Kick off 2 for me. Still play it now from time to time (have it on an emulator on my 360).

Spent many an hour playing The Double on my old speccy 48

Ultimate Soccer Manager. Excellent, you could chuck bungs at people and build and see your stadium / training ground grow as you design it.

This.

http://free-game-downloads.mosw.com/abandonware/pc/sports/games_t_v/ultimate_soccer_manager_98_99.html

Also, Onside on the Playstation, first game you could choose your kit design and colours. Actua Soccer used to have good gameplay, apart from every cross being at 90deg or 45deg angles.

Sega Worldwide Soccer 98 on the Saturn caught my attention too.

Remember playing this a lot as a kid....getting your nominated team from div4 to div1...think the player rating system was a skill level from 1 to 9...pretty basic but fun at the time!

http://www.mobygames.com/game/zx-spectrum/football-director/screenshots

Also, Onside on the Playstation, first game you could choose your kit design and colours. Actua Soccer used to have good gameplay, apart from every cross being at 90deg or 45deg angles.

 

Sega Worldwide Soccer 98 on the Saturn caught my attention too.

If you ignore Kick Off 2 from 1990 or Sensible World of Soccer, to name but 2...!

I used to love World League Soccer 98 on the Playstation, the nearly-right names, proper kits, different formations, solid commentary, weather effects, realistic ball movement, decent keepers and deflections (plus the ability to get a player to keel over from a deflection in the nuts) made it best football game I'd ever played until ISS Pro Evolution Soccer came out - not harmed by Ray Wilkins doing all of his commentary in one sitting, describing the "petulism" of players when he meant "petulance" and referring to "Goal Mouse Inthidents".