Take on the world someday – Pro Evolution Soccer 2

For almost ten years, EA’s FIFA series had been gathering momentum (and licences) and steadily rolling over other football games, to the point where there were increasingly few left. Konami’s International Superstar Soccer, in its various iterations, had been an underdog successfully carving out its own space. Pro Evolution Soccer, the series’s big leap onto the PS2 in 2001, didn’t top the charts, but it was second behind the all-conquering Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and its reputation grew still further. It even ended up outselling the stumbling FIFA Football 2002, although with the caveat that the first Pro Evo release on PS2 was a big hook that couldn’t be repeated. The next year, however, with Pro Evolution Soccer 2, Konami would do no less than take on FIFA head-on… and win.

Jockeying for space in the release date schedule is a complicated sport, in games as in other media. Having your game as the biggest release in a given week, the focus of attention, offers opportunities. That careful spacing out is much of why we’ve pretty much been seeing a different #1 every week in 2002 as we move closer to the Christmas period when sales are at their height. Since FIFA was established as one of the biggest things in Europe, EA had their choice of dates in that prime end-of-year period. They planned to release FIFA Football 2003 across all formats on 2 November 2002, the equivalent release date to the previous year. Pro Evolution Soccer 2 was initially scheduled for the following week, 9 November 2002, already closer to FIFA’s release than its predecessor had been. 

At some point, someone at Konami clearly worked out that, with anticipation building, they were in a position to get the jump on their rivals. So they brought Pro Evo 2’s release date forward two weeks, to 25 October. A week before FIFA 2003. For EA, allowing Pro Evo 2 to be first out and have a week to itself would be bad news, but it would be difficult to shift their entire plans. And so EA moved the release date for only the PS2 version of FIFA to 25 October to match, and the UK got a straight fight between the two, Blur vs Oasis style. Which one sold more, and was the most popular football game, would be obvious to all. Pro Evolution Soccer 2 won that straight fight. 

The striking thing to me, compared to the last time I met the series with the heavyweight ISS Pro Evolution 2 on the PlayStation, is how much closer it feels to FIFA. Or at least, how much closer it feels to This is Football 2002, to the games that FIFA might have become if EA hadn’t got into a muddle of constantly shifting gimmicks, the most recent of which had been trying and failing to be Pro Evo. Compared to its PS1 predecessors, Pro Evolution Soccer had become a lighter, faster, more accessible take on the game of complex realism. 

The big chart battle was between two football games which played their football in broadly similar style, while having obvious differences in presentation. FIFA Football 2003 had all of the licences to be able to immaculately recreate familiar players and teams, commentary which reached impressive new heights, and hit songs of the moment on the soundtrack. Pro Evolution Soccer 2 had tinny trance playing after every goal, Peter Brackley exclaiming “I tell a lie – he’s missed!” five times a match, and Dennis Bergkamp Oranges001 playing up front for Arsenal London. And Pro Evolution Soccer 2 won, because some things matter more than any of that.

If the basic feel of Konami’s game was no longer so distinctively weighty, it still had details to stand out. It uses the controller’s buttons to expand possibilities in thoughtful ways which are still familiar today, like giving you a button to get other defenders to press closer to the player with the ball, and using shoulder buttons as modifiers for the main controls. Hold L1 while you press circle to make a chipped pass; use R2 and L1 to switch up your dribbling beyond the speed changes offered by R1’s sprint button. Every time you get the ball, you have a challenge posed by limited space, but you have the options there to handle it if you can think fast enough and pull it off. And wonderfully fluid animation means that it feels highly responsive and less predictable.

Beyond that, its presentation was not just something to overcome but appealing in its own right. The music that goes bosh when you score a goal is delightfully, uncomplicatedly happy in a way that caps off the whole process emotionally. The players are expressive enough to add to the emotion too. Peter Brackley, best known for his commentary on Channel 4’s Football Italia, couldn’t have been chosen more perfectly for a game seeking to appeal to the football connoisseur. The stadia which you play games in may not have real names, but are spectacular, teeming with flares and noise. This was an underdog vision of football gaming, not chasing to replicate every detail of watching real matches on TV, but going for something whose authenticity was looser and more emotional. It wasn’t what football looks like, it was what football is, you could say. And for one week in 2002, the underdog won.

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Top of the charts for week ending 26 October 2002:

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