In the prelude to the current ultimate form of this blog, I wrote about 16 games based on taking liberties with what might have been the most popular games for each month, maybe. If I fancied writing about them. One of those games was Alter Ego, a remarkable text-based life simulation which told the story of a person through giving the player a set of scenarios and responding to their choice of a mood and action to take in each. Once I managed to find magazines with historic charts in, pivoted to confirmed #1 games, and saw that Alter Ego didn’t meet my criteria, I didn’t expect to be covering anything much like it. I had reckoned without the power of football over the British public.
It’s a little surprising to me that we haven’t encountered any football computer games before now, given their hold in the UK, but this one has an extra advantage of being backed with an official licence. FA Cup Football is so called as the first game based on the Football Association Cup knockout tournament, which is the oldest national football competition in the world. Teams play an opponent and the winner goes through to the next round in a process of winnowing from hundreds of teams to a lone winner. The first FA Cup matches took place in 1871, with the first final, won 1-0 by Wanderers over Royal Engineers, in 1872. To put things in perspective, that means that the FA Cup has been in existence for 18 years longer than Nintendo. The tournament is the star here. Most football games to this point involved taking control of all of the players on one side to play out a match, or managing a side through picking their players and dealing with transfers. FA Cup Football takes a more idiosyncratic approach.
You choose the team(s) that you want to take charge of through the tournament from a numbered list, you watch the draw for who plays against who being made, and then you take part in the matches. And that works to essentially the same model as Alter Ego. For each match you pick a mood (“tactics”) for your team – attacking, balanced or defensive – and sometimes choose an action in response to a scenario. The pitch is slippery – what kind of boots do you send the team out in? You get relegated – do you slash everyone’s pay or keep it the same? You have a fixture cancelled – go on holiday? Then you watch the scores for all the round’s matches updated as they play out.
What effect your choices have is not often very apparent. It seems like choosing to be attacking means more goals for both sides, but that may be me rationalising randomness along narrative lines that make sense to me. With the scenarios, there is no indication whether you picked the right answer or even whether there is a right answer. The whole thing becomes a study in powerlessness more brutal than Alter Ego’s harshest moments. At least that told you where you went wrong.
The powerlessness extends structurally through the game beyond the matches you theoretically have some influence over. At the start of each round of matches you have to watch the game beep through each computer team’s selection of tactics. Sometimes that means sitting through rounds in which you play no part at all. Any matches that end in draws go to a replay, and since penalty shoot-outs hadn’t come in yet, any replays that end in draws go to another reply. Should Stoke City and West Bromwich Albion, or two other teams you have no interest in, take four attempts to decide a winner, you will have to sit through each and every one of them.
It’s this that makes sense of the fact that the game lets you chose eight teams to oversee, and lets you have eight players doing so. You can opt to start from the FA Cup third round and collectively take charge of all 64 teams in it. Eight of you can gather round the screen can watch the draw take shape and take your stake in the cup playing out, surprises and inevitabilities and all. I don’t know if anyone actually did that. I didn’t, but I do remember playing the Commodore 64 version with my brother a couple of times and getting something out of it.
Particularly without that crowd of players, FA Cup Football makes little sense as a game in its own right. Watching a lot of numbers and team names slowly being drawn is not an exciting process. But you could say the same thing about the real thing, and for some people at least it would be very wrong. Seeing Arsenal drawn to play Manchester United, big names coming together in an early round, can be a moment of buzz even if you don’t support either team. Turning on teletext and watching the current football scores update, complex matches reduced to a single line of text, could be hugely tense, even more so than the more informative live text the internet tends to provide today. That’s the kind of ritual that the game positions itself as a simulation of.
If anything, it could do with being even less interactive. It doesn’t work as a game. But in boiling down something complicated and familiar to its bare bones, it does hit on something if the FA Cup means something to you. As a certain type of football fan, it feels like an electronic performance of storied ancient rites.
