In writing about FA Cup Football, I talked about the effect of its familiar rituals for football fans, from the unspoken position that I was one of them. Let’s unpack a bit the extent of the personal pull of its appeal to history.
Elsewhere in 1986, there was a football management game we won’t be covering called The Double. It came packaged with a captivating history of the Double (the achievement of winning the league and the FA Cup in the same season, achieved by Preston North End in the first ever league season in 1888-89, and few teams since). The Double was a tedious game which made FA Cup Football look sleek and rapid. It also possessed a unique quality of any Commodore 64 game I played, in that when our household fridge went through its periodic cycle of powering up or down, the resultant small variation of electricity to the computer would be enough to crash the game. I was so compelled by the prospect of this terrible game that I once got into trouble for getting up early in the morning and turning the fridge off so that I could play it undisturbed.
A few years after that, we won a set of the game Subbuteo, a football-based tabletop game played on a big green cloth pitch. When I wasn’t playing proper games of Subbuteo against other people, I would use it to enact highlights of imaginary leagues formed of a mixture of real and invented teams, carefully writing down the results and scorers. The ritual of FA Cup Football and its fictional tournament iterations was almost identical to one that I chose to enact myself.
I am filibustering here, but also working to build up a contrast, because to me Super Bowl XX is what FA Cup Football must look like if you are not already captivated by its particular ritual. Its action is represented by a lot of tiny, different coloured dots and the emphasis is on picking plays from menus. Nothing stands on its own. Even with a vague knowledge of the rules of American Football mostly picked up from more recent video game representations of it, Super Bowl XX is as impenetrable to me as FA Cup Football was familiar. It is very different from Hardball’s pretty welcome for non-fans.
The interesting question comes from the fact that Super Bowl XX is on this blog because it was a best-selling game in the UK, and is this: which experience were players getting? There have long been a significant number of American Football fans in the UK, as demonstrated by the number of times teams have come over to play in London stadiums, but was the size of the intersection between those fans and Commodore 64 players that significant?
One clue comes in the audio tape packaged with the game. A man with a terminal case of Look Around You voice takes fifteen minutes to explain the basic rules of the sport and its strategies, bookended by congratulating you on purchasing Ocean’s Super Bowl computer game programme. It ends with a skit in which the same man pretends to be the owner of the Chicago Bears calling you to offer you the post as their offensive coach. As a brief summary it didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know but did clear up a couple of rules and firmed up some of the strategy.
The underlying message of the tape, though, was that the UK release of the game was meant in large part for beginners, and that the sense of participating in a major sporting event could be sold even where the ritual was less familiar. It’s a fascinating insight into the British appetite for sports games. Given that no other American Football game has made it to #1 since, it’s also a sign of how the earlier days of computer games still had wide openings for some possibilities that would later be shut out.
