When Daley Thompson came back again for 1988, I mentioned the obvious context of the quadrennial boost provided for multi-sport computer games by the Olympics. There is of course one other comparable sporting event in terms of domination of British cultural consciousness: the men’s football World Cup. So it makes sense that as we finally reach our first standalone, you-control-the-team football game, it’s a World Cup one. Not just any World Cup, either, but one that in the UK represented a particular breakthrough for football’s cultural reach, helped by England reaching the semi-final, Gazza’s tears, and all that.
US Gold came very close to getting a football game to #1 four years earlier, when they narrowly missed the top spot by taking a two-year-old game from Artic Computing and rebadging it as World Cup Carnival with an official licence and some posters. This act of phenomenal cynicism was infamous enough to get referenced in a number of magazine reviews of their Italy 1990, and was surely one no company would get away with again (*checks schedule, sees next game after Italy 1990*… oh.)
For 1990, US Gold did at least make a new game. A new game which uses the capabilities of the Amiga, not just while you’re kicking the ball around the pitch from its standard top-down view, but at every break in play and menu. There are two main schools of football game it draws on. At one end there are the bold arcade games, with their chunky, ultimately anime-based players. Like those, Italy 1990’s players are big and move dramatically, making exaggerated slide tackles. And on top of that, there’s the approach of trying to replicate people’s experience of watching sport on TV. That’s most obvious in having each match introduced by a de-aged electronic Des Lynam sitting at a desk, but very much present each time there’s a goal kick or corner too. The camera pulls back to a long range view so you can admire the scenic view of the set piece taker kicking the ball, before it flips back to the standard view so you can… watch them kick it again in a different trajectory.
It’s a superficially impressive spectacle. As a football fan there is a certain delight that comes just from starting a match and taking control, seeing the big colourful arrow pointing to the player you are moving at that moment and seeing all of the possibilities of being placed into the World Cup. I remember looking longingly at the attract reels of arcade football games that looked a bit like Italy 1990 as long as two World Cups later. That magic is a bit less sufficient when it’s not just after 50p, though, and Italy 1990 does not have much to back up its dazzle. The zoomed-in view makes the players look bold but also means that you can’t see much of what’s happening around them. With the ball magnetically stuck to their feet, going on a run towards the opposing goal turns out to be a better move than trying to pass in almost all situations. When defending, the difficulty of getting control of the player you want is overpowering. If there is depth, it is well hidden behind the surface.
Italy 1990 also fails to fully reckon with the consequences of the same improved graphics. In the days of older games footballers were barely identifiable as such. When Spectrum games struggled to even render players in different colour shirts next to each other, it was easy to think of each footballer on screen in purely functional terms: each is but a marker of a player for a team. In Italy 1990’s grand TV-vision, the striving for realism means going past that. The players need to be more than just generic symbols.
As such, playing a match with Brazil and seeing them in yellow shirts with white shorts, rather than the traditional blue shorts, is noticeably sloppy. In a game of a tournament which makes a big thing of its global nature, every player using the exact same model is much worse. Every team is full of identical people with light olive skin and dark hair. The display may tell you that the player that you are controlling is John Barnes, but it visibly isn’t. Cameroon’s run to the quarter-finals was one of the stories of the tournament, but the game whitewashes them just the same. It’s a theme we will plenty of in future – carelessly producing a ‘default’ person and doing a whole lot of othering to anyone it doesn’t fit. In this case it also does a disservice to the sport and players without whom there wouldn’t be a World Cup Italia ‘90 or an Italy 1990. If you want to make things more real, you can’t just half-arse it.
