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The annual incremental tweaks to EA’s behemoth FC series make it easy to forget this was once a genre that took generational leaps every few years.
Soccer sims were defined and redefined throughout the 90s, noughties and 2010s, and certain features were so groundbreaking that they transformed how we play – sometimes instantly, some only in retrospect. With a bit of help from Richard Moss, author of Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games, I’ve picked nine of the most important features that changed football games forever.
Playing EA FC with fully manual controls, the ball travelling exactly in the direction you push the control stick, is humbling. You’ll realise your aim is not as good as you think and even completing simple short passes is a challenge.
It shows we take AI assists for granted – but they weren’t always there to help. The earliest football games took your input (usually in eight directions) as a direct instruction to pass the ball, so you could only really pass to teammates in specific spots relative to the ball.
In 1985, Konami’s Soccer on the MSX personal computer and the NES game Soccer both included CPU-assisted
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