When I previously covered baseball and American football games, I commented on how the early days of gaming opened up opportunities for games based on less popular sports in the UK, in a way that would not be repeated later on. No snooker games have reached #1 in the UK in the ‘00s or ‘10s either, but this is not the same story. Instead, it is one of a sport which is no longer the draw it once was, but was at the time popular enough to be central in national consciousness. In 1985, as the World Snooker Championship final went on beyond midnight, 18.5 million people watched it on BBC2. No wonder a computer game endorsed by one of those finalists, the world’s top player, was a success. In 2017, by contrast, 4 million tuning in was hailed as a positive result.
With that built in audience, it makes sense that Steve Davis Snooker is not really a snooker game for the novice to the sport. It’s not a complex or forbidding thing either, though. Like Trivial Pursuit, you need to know the rules but it’s welcoming in all other ways. It has simple menu options, you can quickly get started, and the snooker table is laid out in front of you the whole time, viewed from directly above. The table is rendered in a paler shade of green than I’ve ever seen one in, presumably to allow the green ball to stand out, but otherwise the Commodore 64 copes fine with the colours and circles.
For each shot you position a cursor to aim, select spin and select shot power on a meter. There’s none of the technique-simulating challenge of having to stop a moving bar like in Leader Board. Instead, the greater complexity of strategy required for the sport provides the difficulty, together with the fact that aiming isn’t the most precise exercise. Its shots don’t feel quite right to real life – balls move a little too freely, as if they’re stones sliding across ice, which only increases the temptation to whack the power right up and see what happens – but they’re not miles off and the physics is consistent enough to give you a lot of possibilities to work with.
Steve Davis Snooker makes a strong case for its approach being the best way to do an unambitious sports sim. It is both thorough and straightforward, if not exactly full of personality. In fact, its efficient functionality could not be more fitting for the six-times world champion given the ironic nickname Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis.
