"Pele's Soccer" and Other Retro Footie Games

Recently at work, a group of 32 lucky punters took part in some kind of FIFA14 World Tournament. The game itself is very life like, it almost pours off the screen into the real world, and the moonlighting managers (three hour lunch break today eh chaps?) sit and cheer like real fans.

Am I taking part? Am I watching? Like hell.

For me, the shiny modernity of a modern football game just doesn’t cut it. It has no quaintness, no charm, and frankly if you like football that realistic, why not just go and play in the garden for pity’s sake?

I liked my football games a little more old school. Not that I was any kind of gamer now, then, or ever, but as any kid does, I enjoyed playing on my friends computer’s, and soccer type games actually offered some of the few decent opportunities for live head to head contests.

It goes all the way back, in fact, to the 70s, where visiting my father’s house I came across a classic Atari cartridge console. It was the second video game I’d ever seen, after an early “Pong” console on holiday in Arran, and it belonged to the son of a very famous footballer of days gone by. My stepbrothers used to borrow it, and I loved it, especially the “Combat” cartridge with the biplanes.

The game that got played the most was the first football game, the inimitable “Pele’s Soccer.” No flash manager mode here, you were limited to selecting a formation of, er, 1-2 as your men, shown in plan view as hexagonal blocks with sticky-out little feet, were clearly skewered together in a fixed equilateral triangle, kidneys impaled. It didn’t seem to stop them running, as they flew up and down the pitch accompanied by a marching little sound like a centipede tap-dancing. The round ball was a square and only travelled in straight or 45 degree lines (much like England) and a shrill whistle blasted out of the screen if it went out of play.

It's all action on the wing

The scoring of goals, a relatively easy business as the console controlled goalkeeper had the speed of a shrivelled slug, was signalled by a computerised fanfare, and firework display graphics nicked from the advert breaks on the Benny Hill show.

I say scoring was an easy business, I should have added “if you were playing me” because I hardly ever caused Benny Hill expressions of goalular delight, while my stepbrother and his cousins would regularly stuff twenty past me in an eight minute game. I always tried to claim it wa because I had the crap joystick where the handle grip would come off.

They would say it was because I was crap. They were right.

I played other olde school football games on various platforms. “Football Manager” on the Sinclair ZX81 offered, um, a blurry grey screen interrupted by score reports and the chance to manage Newport County, but it was the progenitor to one of the most successful game series. The Spectrum version had highlights; black or red stick men either scoring or not scoring, in very jerky basic.

“Match Day” on the Spectrum was a real cut above any previous game, however. It was probably the first to have anything even approximating playable, realistic action, and you could use Panini 82 World Cup annuals to name and commentate upon all your players - “And what a goal for Boniek!!!”. You could even play on a black pitch, but too bad about the unstoppable goals from throw ins.

That were scored against me by my friend. In great numbers. I never won a game of this either.

Scoring in "Match Day". Just like I never did

“Pele’s Soccer" was still the best though. The great man even endorsed it. That’s how good he thought the three impaled hexagons in a triangle were.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 30.07.14

Gorf - To a child, THE FUTURE

Compared to my grown up self, that is rather blase about computer games and gaming, the child version of me was absolutely enthralled by early video games. I remember first playing on a "Pong" cabinet in the Grand Hotel, Brodick in 1978, a holiday also memorable for me being banished from the hotel dining room after throwing up a chicken maryland all over it, many happy hours on a mini golf course, and the sheer upset of Scotland's world cup demise settling over Arran.

I was thrilled by Pong, to a Blakes 7 and Star Wars loving kid, this was space brought down to planet earth. Space Invaders was even more of a step up - lasers in a box! - and soon every chip shop in England had Galaxians bleeping away in a corner.

But my stepfather disapproved of such games, claming them to be a total waste of money and the past-time of dodgy youths. If ever we were at a motorway service station, my hopeful hanging around the games as they demoed away was always met with derision, not a single 10p coin was I ever given to feed to the intergalactic Moloch by the exits.

Heartbroken, I would pretend to play the demo, fingers on the buttons in hope the machine would spring to life beneath me. It never did. When we did get a Commodore 64 a few years later, only tedious educational software like dull as ditchwater "Gortek and the Microchips" was encouraged.

However, trips to stay with my father over in Manchester led to escape from videogame exile though. My father would take me to an early video game arcade in the guts of the Arndale complex in the centre of the city, near what I think was called Shambles Square. A modern entire glass fronted paradise, this arcade was neon lit, noisy, and full of the sounds of space.

And within its glass walls, lived GORF.

Gorf was incredible! Never mind Space Invaders with its boring left-right-fire buttons and monochrome graphics tinted by coloured perspex, Gorf was a cabinet of the universe beamed down to enrapture an 8 year old with its tricks. It had a massive, space ship joy stick, real colours that sprang out of the screen, and a craft that moved in TWO WHOLE DIMENSIONS rather than one.

More than that, it talked. It actually spoke to you.

It spoke to me a lot.

"BAD MOVE, SPACE CADET" it robotically intoned at me every time I got killed. Which was, like, about every thirty seconds. Despoite my excitement at them, I was rubbish at playing video games, always was, and probably still would be now. Many 10p coins my father gave me; many times I got balsted to bits without clearing so much a single level of aliens, all accompanied by Gorf's electronic taunts.

I didn't mind. I just loved Gorf so much, my father used to talk to me in a Gorf voice a lot. Gorf was always a treat dangled at me, for a couple of times every visit, if I was good.

Then, tragedy. That little arcade disappeared, swallowed up by heaven knows what, and to my father, the new treat was a trip to The Gogglebox video shop in Hale or Altrincham to hire a pirated ET.

New toys for new times. I eventually had tabletop Scramble and Firefox F7 that I played to death. But I've never forgotten Gorf. And I've never forgotten the wonder I felt as that young, enraptured child.