THE HISTORY OF VIDEOGAMES PART 6 - June 1999
| Only Americans could invent a sport where 95% of the
players never touch the ball with their feet, and call it "football". Duh. But
football gridiron-style holds a claim to fame other than "stupidest-named sport of
all time", and that's "first ever proper videogame sport". The
self-explanatorily-named Atari Football made its debut in arcades in 1978, so
kick-starting the long line of massively popular and ever more realistic sims that's
led to the situation today where titles like FIFA Soccer and Madden 99 are the biggest
blockbusters in the business, trouncing even the super-hyped likes of Tomb Raider and
Quake into comparative sales insignificance. Atari Football itself was a pretty simplistic game (although with up to four players all crazily spinning the trackballs used to control the little X-and-O players it was a frenetic kind of simplicity), but compared to the weird, abstract versions of "sports" presented by games like Pong, it was the first big step towards making videogame sports look, feel and play like their real-world counterparts. Of course, whether making videogames more like boring old reality and less like videogames is actually a good thing or not is more of a matter of opinion... |
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