As I make my way through the ‘90s, I’ve been playing a succession of new football series arriving at the top of the charts. There were already plenty of football games being made in the ‘80s, but not to the same degree of success. 1995 is about halfway through the boom period that followed, which coincided with the exciting new possibilities offered by 16-bit machines and then the extended 3D capabilities of their successors. In the couple of decades that followed, the boom narrowed, and in the present day there are few mainstream series left as EA’s FIFA sucks up all of the available oxygen. If you don’t include management sims, then when it comes to making football games capable of topping the charts, Konami are the only rivals to EA left standing. International Superstar Soccer is their introduction.
In many ways, ISS is more old school than FIFA. The game is viewed from a raised vantage point almost completely side-on to the pitch, with just a tweak to make the goal a more visible target, in much the same way as Manchester United Europe and the like. Running in straight lines is an obvious and encouraged tactic. A direct line through from Japanese arcade games is clear, not least in the voice samples that announce every break in play. There is no revolution to be had here.
As an experience, though, ISS is a cut above both the older games it resembles and EA’s early FIFA efforts. Konami exploit the advantages of the SNES controller and its array of buttons to do things which make single button joysticks look as outdated as they were for this type of football game, giving a meaningful set of different ways to kick and tackle and a dedicated button for changing which player you are controlling when you don’t have the ball. A button for fast sprinting immediately makes the basic tactic of running in a straight line a little more interesting, as does the fact that defenders have enough weight and presence to make them harder to brush aside.
Other alternatives work better too, though – passing the ball between players with a button tap feels sharp and useful in a way often lacking. There are bits which feel like FIFA’s pre-packed spectacular plays, but they feel a lot less like a constant divine hand nudging the ball around. In ISS, the lob button results in the ball rocketing ludicrously into the sky and players leaping for powerful headers and bicycle kicking like they’re in Captain Tsubasa, but as soon as the ball returns to the ground it returns to the realm of the natural.
Another area in which ISS balances the over-the-top and the realistic nicely is its goalkeepers, who have the reflexes and spring-powered leaps of cats but also match cats in their ability to hold on to a football. On one hand, a world in which 90% of goals are scored on the rebound is not a realistic one, but on the other more important hand, frenetic goalmouth pinball is too much fun to mind.
That goalmouth action also benefits from the final upgrade ISS brings along, which is in how it looks. More zoomed in than most, its players look a lot more like real people, and even if they all have the same lean build, teammates at least aren’t clones of each other. All players have different numbers visible on the backs of their shirts and though they do not have real player names there are at least a couple of different appearances for each team and a welcome change from whitewashing. The Colombia team even features a passable attempt at Carlos Valderrama and his hair.
The downside of the impressive detail is that you can’t see much of the pitch and end up having to use the radar representation that takes up a chunk of the bottom of the screen, meaning that rather than taking in the action you’re often staring at little coloured dots to pick out a pass to a teammate off-screen. It’s less frustrating than it would be if the passing didn’t work so well, but ISS is still clearly imperfect. It has its moments of awkwardness and it’s nowhere near as fun as Sensible World of Soccer. What it has going for it more than any other football game to date, however, is a clear path to improving in the future. Much more than FIFA, ISS plays like a template for a different type of amazing football game as soon as technology allows. Let’s see how that turns out.
Gallup cartridge chart, Computer Trade Weekly 6 March 1995 (chart for week to 25 February 1995)