In 1984, Artic released a football computer game called World Cup Football. The Spectrum version scored 71% in Crash magazine, with one of its reviewers concluding “This is the best interactive football game for the Spectrum and football fans should get it”. World Cup Football reached #17 in the UK all formats chart. 

In 1986, U.S. Gold released a football computer game called World Cup Carnival. The Spectrum version scored 26% in Crash magazine, with one of its reviewers concluding “This game is awful, avoid at all costs”. World Cup Carnival reached #1 in the UK all formats chart. 

World Cup Football and World Cup Carnival were the same game.

  • World Cup Football (Artic, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • World Cup Football (Artic, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • World Cup Carnival (U.S. Gold, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • World Cup Carnival (U.S. Gold, 1986, ZX Spectrum)

Magazines are not monoliths. Different critics have different opinions. That’s a normal thing, and something that Crash went out of its way to recognise this with each review having three different “criticism” sections from different people. Sister publication Zzap! 64 did this even more clearly by actually giving the names of the reviewers, and a little drawing of them too. Reviewers can look at the same game in the same conditions and have very different views. That is not what happened with World Cup Football and World Cup Carnival, though, which is its own unique tale of farce and deception.

World Cup Football on the ZX Spectrum was the work of Donald Campbell, who had previously written the Missile Command-inspired Earth Defence. After the success of International Soccer on the Commodore 64, it was clear that there was an opportunity for a football simulation on the Spectrum. One where you took control of the players on the pitch, unlike Football Manager. Jon Ritman, who had just moved on from Artic, also recognised as much and, together with Chris Clarke, came up with the very successful Match Day, before going on to work on Batman.

Back at Artic, Campbell moved faster and got World Cup Football finished much earlier, releasing five months before Match Day, in July 1984. It was two years away from the World Cup and Artic didn’t have any official rights, but never mind. There were also some rather tricky problems on the Spectrum, such as the fact that details in white looked bad against its bright green, and its inability to show more than two colours together within a small space. Campbell and his game’s teams of six stick figures each, in black and white, didn’t do much to solve those problems, but never mind that either. The game was a football simulation on the Spectrum. 

  • World Cup Football (Artic, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • World Cup Football (Artic, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • World Cup Football (Artic, 1984, ZX Spectrum)

That, really, is what comes across in the contemporary reviews of World Cup Football. Popular Computing Weekly could only compare it to International Soccer and called it “within the limitations of Spectrum graphics, an excellent game”. Computer & Video Games also gave it high marks and highlighted its status as the first of its kind: “Now, Artic has brought out a full arcade football game.” Crash identified one predecessor, Star Soccer, but that was a game which represented the players with numbers in squares, was made for less powerful 16K Spectrums, and wasn’t even available any more. In World Cup Football, “the actual football play is okay but not up to the standard of such games for other machines” wrote the least enthusiastic of Crash’s three reviewers. “Nevertheless, its uniqueness makes it good”. 

Within that context, only CA of Personal Computer Games really went in two-footed on the game’s many issues. They wrote that the “animation isn’t very convincing“ and “when two opposing players overlap, the black one momentarily disappears, making it hard at time to keep track of play” before continuing that “the biggest draw-back is the play itself”, lamenting the lack of point of even trying to pass the ball. 

The uniqueness that let World Cup Football mostly get away with its issues disappeared once Ocean’s Match Day arrived, and it also showed that things could be done better. Come the end of 1985, it made sense that when publisher U.S. Gold managed to secure the rights to produce an official game for the 1986 World Cup, they turned to Ocean to make it. Not only did the two companies partially share ownership and have a longstanding arrangement, Ocean had published the Spectrum football game which had set the standard to follow.

  • Match Day (Ocean, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Match Day (Ocean, 1984, ZX Spectrum)

What happened next is not entirely clear, but somewhat infamous. The Story of U.S. Gold by Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean offers the fullest version, as told by U.S. Gold boss Geoff Brown and general manager Tim Chaney. Chaney reported that Ocean had said they could do it, and that they would use their Match Day code. Then “three months before the World Cup we were so busy I hadn’t given it much thought”, but Brown called Ocean, and found out they hadn’t made a game at all.

There are some suggestions, including from U.S. Gold at the time, that someone more specific had been contracted to make a World Cup game and let U.S Gold/Ocean down. This seems believable given the example I already wrote about with Yie Ar Kung-Fu, released on Ocean’s Imagine label. They contracted the various versions of that one out to someone they’d met only once, who further subcontracted it to some teenagers. Ocean’s in-house coders ended up having to step in and rescue the Commodore 64 version. Yie Ar Kung-Fu then ended up the UK’s best selling game of 1986. Maybe the World Cup game was just one time they didn’t get away with it.

  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Imagine, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Imagine, 1986, Commodore 64)

Given the specific mention of Match Day code, it’s also worth highlighting that Match Day designer Jon Ritman was not an Ocean employee, and had made that game for them on a freelance basis. And in a 1986 interview with Crash, Ritman had this to say about why Batman took a long time to make: “I tend to work in intense spurts […] and I did have three months off between August and October last year — I just wanted a rest”. Given the timing, perhaps there was a hope that Ritman might be involved in making a World Cup game, which didn’t pan out.

Whatever happened, U.S. Gold had a big problem. “We went out to every single developer in the UK” said Brown, and told them “we’ll pay you a lot of money to take your game and overlay it with the properly licensed items, graphics… Artic were the only one who came forward and said they could do it in time”. Above just being willing, there was also the fact that Artic had a game ready to use not just on Spectrum but on all of the three most popular formats. They had also put out football games, by John Prince, under World Cup titles on Amstrad CPC (marginally better than the Spectrum one) and on Commodore 64 (absolutely dire, with players who stand stock still when not on the ball).

And so, each version of World Cup Football got some minor graphical edits, a different set of teams, and some derisory extra features with a Daley Thompson’s Supertest feel, and became World Cup Carnival. Sometimes the edits highlighted the problems, like putting each team’s actual shirt colours on the Spectrum score display but still having their footballers as black and white stick figures regardless. At U.S. Gold, Tim Chaney was well aware of the issues with putting out such an outdated game under a new guise, but had a solution. “I said this is shit, we’ve got a problem with this. This game is gonna get panned. […] So we got this big box and we put inside stickers, a wall chart, loads of stuff […] then we marketed the hell out of it but we didn’t show the game to anyone”. 

  • World Cup Carnival (U.S. Gold, 1986, Amstrad CPC)
  • World Cup Carnival (U.S. Gold, 1986, Amstrad CPC)
  • World Cup Carnival (U.S. Gold, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • World Cup Carnival (U.S. Gold, 1986, Commodore 64)

As such, Crash’s news item ahead of the game, for example, mentioned a full colour poster, stick-on flags and badges, but no details of the actual game whatsoever. Some others like Computer & Video Games did quote U.S. Gold’s claim that the game would “reach new standards in football simulation”. By the time Britain’s games press were able to actually review World Cup Carnival, the combination of U.S. Gold’s marketing and public enthusiasm for the World Cup had already been enough to take the game to the top of the charts. The World Cup itself was just about over. On discovering the con, critics were in furious mood. 

“The graphics and scrolling routines are straight out of the ark. This is mutton dressed as lamb” wrote Clare Edgeley in Sinclair User. “The holes in this game are so wide you could drive an Artic through them” said Your Sinclair; “Maybe U.S. Gold should go in for the souvenir market full time!”. Meanwhile in Crash, a reviewer wrote that “World Cup Carnival is an appalling game and it’s a disgrace to see a big software house like US Gold releasing it”. In the context of England’s recent World Cup exit at the hand of Argentina, AW in Amstrad Action had the harshest review of all: “A real professional foul by U.S. Gold. I mean, I feel completely outraged by their behaviour and l didn’t even buy the miserable game. Maradona is Mr. Honest in comparison.”

  • World Cup Carnival (U.S. Gold, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • World Cup Carnival (U.S. Gold, 1986, ZX Spectrum)

Dissatisfaction rumbled on through various letters pages over months. “I felt conned and cheated and my respect for this software house has greatly decreased” wrote one Computer & Video Games reader, with the magazine responding “I think your reaction is fairly typical”. A Sinclair User reader reported returning the game and having U.S. Gold tell them on the phone that they were “not in the habit of giving refunds” before hanging up. World Cup Carnival would go on to win that year’s Crash Readers’ Award for Least Pleasing Game.

U.S. Gold wrote an explanatory letter to Crash which was a masterclass in dissembling: “In some respects, World Cup Carnival was to the good of the software market. It has set a precedent for publishers to produce quality software on the back of a licence which U.S. Gold has been proud to have been able to achieve without exception in the past.” They also claimed not to have misled the public because they told retailers to warn people it was the same game. One reader wrote in response that the idea World Cup Carnival had been to the good of the software market was “pure rubbish”.

  • World Cup Carnival (U.S. Gold, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • World Cup Carnival (U.S. Gold, 1986, Amstrad CPC)

It wasn’t just the general public who were unhappy. In Popular Computer Weekly, one computer shop owner estimated that 25% of copies of World Cup Carnival were being returned; “a phenomenal number of people are coming back with it”. He also reported that he and various peers had not been warned of the game’s origins. Tim Chaney of U.S. Gold described retailer reaction to discovering what World Cup Carnival actually was as “everybody went completely ballistic.” 

Chaney had a plan there too, though. “We were big enough that we could stiff everyone and come back afterwards and say sorry about that, here’s a new game.” “We didn’t take many games back because we said to the retailers you’ve got Leader Board coming, so keep World Cup Carnival and we’ll give you a discount on Leader Board”. As to whether the plan worked… well, I will be writing about Leader Board as a UK #1 game in four posts’ time.

  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 24 May 1986, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 31 May 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

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