Early console and 8-bit computer days
The first arcade system labeled as "Soccer" came out in 1973, being a variation of Pong in the guise of a soccer game: Taito's Soccer. [1] The first home video game console was the Magnavox Odyssey, which received an association football game with the title Soccer in 1974. [2] This game was controlled by paddles, similar to the Pong games of the time, and relied on a transparent overlay that simulated a soccer pitch on the television. It was essentially a table tennis game with a soccer skin overlaid on it.
In 1977, the launch of the Atari VCS (also known as the Atari 2600), based on the inexpensive MOS 6502 microprocessor architecture, brought video gaming to many homes. This was the first successful mass-market modular video game console, and it made it possible to play a variety of different games on the same console. In 1980, Atari's Pelé's Soccer/Championship Soccer became the first console association football game to be playable at home. [3] It resembled an actual football pitch much more than previous games, featuring a scrolling field, and it also had a celebration screen, a novelty for video games at the time. The graphics, although still crude by modern standards, were considered much better than in the Pong variants that preceded it. The 1983 updated Atari RealSports Soccer improved the graphics and gameplay, under the RealSports brand of updates to several sport video games. Its release happened around the time of the video game industry crash of 1983.
In the early 1980s, the 8-bit home computer market, also based on the MOS 6502 microprocessor architecture, was going well. In 1982, the first successful home computer version of an association football game, called simply Soccer, was launched by Thorn EMI for the Atari 800 range of computers, both on cartridges and on 5¼-inch floppy disks. [4] The launch of the Commodore 64, also in 1982, brought home computers to many more households, and the development of association football video games really took off. The 16-bit home computer era of the latter 1980s continued the trend.
