France 98! The men’s football World Cup of Zinedine Zidane and his rash actions (no, not that one), of Spain 2 – 3 Nigeria, of Michael Owen, of Blanco’s Cuauhtemiña, of Fauré’s Pavane, of Dennis Bergkamp! Dennis Bergkamp! Dennis Bergkamp!!
Also, the World Cup of EA’s first entry into the event-specific FIFA game. Sort of. EA had already made use of their recently acquired shiny exclusive rights to the World Cup everywhere outside of Japan. As this isn’t a yearly numbered FIFA game, I’m going freestyle outside of the confines of my usual set of categories, but I can’t go without a mention of the sepp-blatter-rain-of-banknotes.gif greed index. Releasing a World Cup game which is largely identical to the already-World-Cup-themed FIFA 98, a matter of months afterwards, for full price, scores a full 1 on the index.
I wasn’t disappointed by World Cup 98, though. Partly that was because I didn’t have FIFA 98 any more, having played it on a medium-term swap deal where the other side was my friend borrowing Little Big Adventure 2 after I’d finished it. Getting an updated version of the same thing as FIFA 98 was a positive, if anything. Mostly, though, it’s because of exactly the kind of positive association EA would hope for from a World Cup game.
I remember watching much of the 1994 World Cup, held in the USA, but it was distant and inaccessible. It was half the world away, frequently on well past my bedtime, and England had failed to qualify, plus I lacked knowledge of so much football and non-football context. That had all changed by World Cup 98, which had England (and Scotland) competing and was the main topic of conversation at my school for its duration. My class even went on a trip to France during it, if not to any matches, so it felt that much closer still. The ‘98 entry in England’s sequence of heartbreaking tournament defeats on penalties was the second I experienced first hand, and the one which hurt the most, the sting just beginning to turn bitter but not yet numb.
With the playable version of it in World Cup 98 I could relive the best bits, and seek to correct the not so good bits. Every team’s kit was present in impressive detail (slightly less so on the PlayStation version, never mind after two decades more of graphical advances), there was World Cup trivia at half time, and Des Lynam stating the obvious about the group standings between each match. It may have offered little more than a smattering of extra detail to an established game, but that detail was exactly the right thing at the right time.
When the World Cup was finished for real, we didn’t discard World Cup 98, though. The match-to-match enjoyment of playing against my brother didn’t get any less, and while the game’s options were limited there was enough that we could keep going. As well as playing out the real tournament draw, you could randomise it, and you could also select teams from a slightly puzzling wider selection than the 32 in the tournament. It couldn’t compare to the 199 in FIFA 98, but it had another eight teams including Greece, Sweden, China, and Canada, the last for no good reason other than the game’s developers being Canadian.
And so, taking control of every team, we played out France 98 and then played out Korea/Japan 2002, and then South Africa 2006 (we were four years out there) and beyond. Every match took its place in the framework of the excitement of the World Cup, and new narratives and rivalries developed across our imagined decades. What was, at heart, an easy update of the same decent football video game took on a new life. We were a prime example of how successfully it piggybacked on other cultural forces. No wonder those exclusive rights were such a powerful tool.
