Trigger Happy
pixel humans in approximations of sprinting, shotputting, ice-skating, ski-jumping and the like.
Variations on tennis, soccer (classic examples were Match Day and Sensible Soccer), ice hockey and baseball followed; graphics became more detailed, control methods more complex, and environments more colorful and detailed. The promising sub-genre of “futuristic sports,” where designers, freed from the limitations of having to reproduce a messy, real sport, could attempt to create the perfect physical game, threw up a few fine moments—most notably the wonderful Speedball, a violent, sci-fi kind of taghockey that is still considered by many to be the best sports game ever made. But the unbeatable advantage of “real” football, soccer, basketball and hockey games is that the rules are given and everyone knows them: you don’t have to spend precious time studying a manual to learn how to win.
When videogames cracked 3D representation in the mid-1990s, sports games flourished as never before. Today the world’s largest software publisher is the one that has the most impressive stable of sports games: Electronic Arts, which for the financial year 1998–99 broke the billion-dollar turnover mark. The soccer game is one of the most popular videogame genres of
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