I played Super International Cricket alongside Brian Lara Cricket, and it did it no favours at all. While doing a great deal of the same things, down to very similar-looking inset animations for umpire decisions, it manages to be more complicated while feeling less free. It also looks and sounds much worse. I can’t imagine it sparking interest in the sport in the same way.
It looks a fair bit like International Superstar Soccer, which I assume is a coincidence despite the titles (ISS was by Konami and this is by Australians Beam Software, previously Melbourne House of Way of the Exploding Fist fame), but what works for a flowing football match doesn’t work for a static cricket match. The scrolling on the bowler’s run-up takes out of the moment more than it adds in and I missed the close-up view and charming detail of Brian Lara Cricket fast.
Bowling and batting both come down to making choices between different options on the SNES’s four buttons while adding direction, but the range of choices doesn’t lead to any real-feeling interactions with the ball. Having a button for an appeal while fielding just made me never want to hear the muddy digitised “howzat!” speech sample every again.
The single worst thing, though, is the mix-up that frequently occurs when batting and trying to move towards the ball. As soon as you hit it, the controls switch to those for running, and the input carries forward into starting a run, even if you’ve just nudged to ball to a lurking opponent and trying to fit in a run is a monumentally terrible decision. I lost count of the number of times that my batsmen got run out through this, and it never got any less frustrating.
The success of such a game up alongside such a superior competitor has one obvious explanation. Brian Lara Cricket was released for Sega’s Mega Drive console, and Super International Cricket for Nintendo’s SNES. In 1995 I knew several people with Mega Drives, one person with a SNES, and no one with both. The majority of people playing games who fancied a bit of console cricket were not choosing between Super International Cricket and Brian Lara Cricket, but between their console’s cricket game or nothing.
This is a split in games which isn’t matched by any other medium I can think of. When people had to choose between Betamax and VHS, there was a lot more crossover between what was released on the two than between the Mega Drive and SNES and Amiga, each with their own key exclusive games. Mega Drive vs SNES was a popular partisan argument that it was easy to come across when looking at anything relating to either, encouraged by the companies themselves. The most similar thing I can think of is playground arguments over Manchester United vs Liverpool or similar. If you spent hundreds of pounds on a SNES and were reading stuff on the side of the SNES everywhere, that’s a significant force to get you to say that your console’s game is the better one.
This supporting of sides has been a part of games for as long as I can remember (from my earliest games magazines I got instantly that Commodore 64 vs Spectrum was a thing) and it’s only in modern streaming-subscription-exclusive times that anything looks like catching up. The poisonousness within games culture has many causes, but the inbuilt playing out of consumerism as a sports rivalry, as represented by the absurd facing off of rival cricket exclusives, is right up there.
Gallup cartridge chart, Computer Trade Weekly 3 July 1995 (chart for week to 24 June 1995)