This is the first article in this series, which looks at the plethora of football games I’ve wasted countless hours on down the years. I’ll try keep it roughly in chronological order - no easy feat.
We start at the beginning, though. My parents bought my brothers and me a second-hand ZX Spectrum around 1989. For those of you who have only known consoles, the ZX Spectrum was a keyboard with a cassette player built into it. The games were on cassettes - you stuck them in the player, and pushed ‘play’ and waited for several minutes for the game to load. This was a tense time as you endured a mind-crushing screeching sound, with a 50-70% chance of success that the game would actually load.
This machine came with around 50 games that the previous owner had curated. One of them was Matchday II. I never played the original.
An internet search tells me Matchday II reached #2 in the games charts, so clearly it was a hit.
This was my first football game. Control pads weren’t on my radar then. Matchday was played using the keyboard or a joystick. Fortunately, the controls were as basic as four directional keys and a utilitarian ‘kick’ button.
The internet tells me Matchday II was the first game to feature a ‘kickometer’ to control the power of the kick, say, the difference between a pass and a shot. I don’t really recall this, though my memory is hazy. My experience of the gameplay was that it was very difficult to score. Like all games at the time, the players kicked the ball in the direction they were facing, which meant getting your player into a zone where a diagonal shot towards the far corner stood a chance of success. Easier said than done.
Tackling was also difficult, I recall. In fact, it was non-existent. The only way to regain possession was either through a misplaced pass, or by barging/wrestling the attacker off the ball. This gave rise to long dribbles out of defence that were hard to stop.
And we must mention the keepers. My dad would often say of keepers that they ‘went down in instalments’. This was true of the keepers on Matchday II, the animation from standing to diving featuring maybe three frames.
There were two attractive features of Matchday II that caught my attention though. The first was that it was possible to customise the colour of the pitch. Want a blue pitch with yellow lines? No problem. Black with green lines? There you go!
Then there were the team names. I wonder if they were as ridiculous to an adult as they were to my seven-year-old self. I am compelled to give you the full list, as this wasn’t a situation where you could play as your favourite team. Oh no, we had…
Ritman United
Soccerama
Darnell City
Ocean Blues
Legs Eleven (always my team of choice - the hilarity!)
Bombay Mix (lost on me then, but kind of hilarious and problematic now)
Stevens FC
Kevs Cosmos
It’s like a list of rejected MLS franchises.
That’s it on Matchday II. I enjoyed writing this. I hope you enjoyed reading it.
TME