[I recently discovered that I missed out a large number of #1 games from earlier in the ’90s, and with help I’m working through one a week. Please get in touch if you are interested in writing about any of them!]
In 1988, Epyx won an American court battle against Data East, with the ruling that International Karate’s similarities to Karate Champ were a product of making a karate game and did not constitute copyright infringement. It’s one of the most interesting things I’ve learned about from Video Game Newsroom Time Machine recently, and it had a lasting effect on video games that went beyond the US. Data East themselves would later use the precedent to get away with releasing a game with strong resemblence to Street Fighter II. And it helped create the circumstances in which multiple different follow-ups to the same game, operating on mostly the same ideas, could happily co-exist.
Goal! Is the product of the kind of falling out that happens sometimes between developer and publisher, or individual developer and development company, with the key person (or people) going one way and the game’s name the other way. It’s the same thing that led to Football Manager and Championship Manager games co-existing, and we’re going to meet another example of sorts from 1999 on Friday. In Goal!’s case, we’re talking about the fallout from the success of Kick Off and its sequel, with publisher Anco retaining the name and programmer Dino Dini taking the fact that he made the thing and setting up elsewhere with partner Pam Dini as Dini & Dini.
Kick Off was not released as Dino Dini’s Kick Off, but his distinctive name must have helped in getting people to pay attention to his own game and in making Goal! a moderate success. Sticking as closely as it does to the Kick Off model was also shrewd in the circumstances, establishing it as the real sequel to Kick Off 2. It even has the same way of highlighting the player you are controlling with a horizontal black line a little under their feet. I found it easy to parse as a shadow and imagined myself in a world of gently levitating footballers.
Unlike the Mega Drive mess spun out from the series, I found it easy enough to score goals in Goal!, with a balance struck between the realistically un-sticky ball and being able to make some more deliberate choices about what I was going to do with it. My goals were usually a bit reliant on the goalkeepers performing about as well as David De Gea this week, but it didn’t feel too contrived. And trapping and passing feels slick even as the players swarm around in a buzzing cloud.
In light of where football games were at this point, one interesting thing is how Goal! acknowledges Sensible Soccer and the limits of that acknowledgement. Gameplay continues to be more complex, with more sense of possibility and less of a game playing out on a perfectly calibrated grid than Sensi. A tap of the space bar switches to a far more zoomed-out view of the pitch, and among the various sizes you can set the radar to is removing it completely. Do both, squint a little, and as the ball pings about you could almost be playing Sensible Soccer, just with less perfectly-formed pixelated miniature people. It’s somewhat of a flex: Dino Dini wasn’t going to be taking Sensible Software to court, but he could highlight how much of what they got right was already there in his games beneath the superficial differences.
