XP Arcade: Football Champ

If you ask Tomohiro Nishikado, the first-ever original Japanese video game was 1973’s Soccer. And you could ask Nishikado — or look at his career history on his website — since he was the one who developed it for Taito, and did so at a time when Pong clones were what went to market. Not the first Japanese-developed video game, no — not even the first for Taito, where Nishikado worked, as that was Pong clone Elepong — but original work? Soccer released in November of 1973, the same month as a few other Taito releases like Pro Hockey, Astro Race, and another Nishikado joint in Davis Cup, but it was finished before the rest. Hence Nishikado’s claim to fame. Well, one of them — the man did create Space Invaders and all.

Whether Soccer actually was first — there is some debate on the subject — what is known for sure is that it wasn’t a direct Pong clone, but it was a variant on the theme, at least, as many video games of the day were (including more than one other title by Nishikado, such as TV Basketball, which was the first-ever game to use character sprites to represent humans — hey look another claim to fame). It used a green background to represent the pitch rather than Pong’s black, and you could control both a goalkeeper and a forward instead of just the singular paddle, giving you someone to protect the goal and another player to attempt to score with, changing the nature of the angle- and physics-based game. It looks an awful lot like Pong still, but hey, Galaxian wasn’t Space Invaders even if they had some base similarities, you know? At least there was some iteration here, which helps move things forward.

This was not Taito’s first foray into association soccer, however, despite its potential other firsts. In 1967, Taito released the electro-mechanical arcade game, Crown Soccer Special. It looked like a pinball table, but was actually a head-to-head game with goals at each end and pinball-style obstacles in the middle of the “pitch”. This table released in Taito’s first year of operation in this space; soccer was a pillar for Taito from the start, but as the company found success in other genres and moved away from the electro-mechanical and Pong-variant worlds, that interest in and focus on soccer waned.

Taito didn’t bail on soccer forever, though. In 1986, Kick and Run released in arcades, and then was later ported to the Famicom Disk System in ‘88. This was absolutely not a game you could confuse for Pong: the pitch looked like it should, with lines drawn on the field where they should be, and the 22 players were dressed in kits, with a score bug and timer shown on-screen, as well. Soccer that looked like soccer, from an overhead view! And there was a kick pedal in the arcade machine, too, so you could get your feet involved while playing. Another fun note: since this game released in 1986, a bootleg version hit arcades with the title of “Mexico 86,” since the 1986 World Cup was held there.

Taito had tried electromechanical soccer. Its first original game — maybe the first original Japanese game — had been a Pong-as-soccer variant. Taito had gone a more realistic route in arcades over a decade later, with an 11v11 setup and a kick pedal, to boot. For its next attempt, Taito would forego the realism and go for the goofy. That was Football Champ.

While Football Champ retained the horizontal, overhead viewpoint of Kick and Run, as well as the full slate of players out on the field, things were very different this time. There was an emphasis on violence, for one. This wasn’t a proto-Blitz sports title, by any means, but Football Champ is played fast and loose. So long as the ref doesn’t catch you, you can get away with some serious fouls. Punch a guy in the face or the back of the head, it’s fine. Slide tackle to your heart’s content. Pull at a jersey to hold a player and slow them down. Do your best Bryan Danielson impression and Busaiku Knee your opponents — even if you don’t know offhand what that is, you at least realize from the name that it ain’t soccer. It’s all good here, though, if the ref isn’t watching. And because of the way things work with the official — there is just one, for starters, and he does not run as fast as your players — you can make it so the ref isn’t watching fairly regularly.

Outrun the ref by moving across the pitch quicker than he can catch up. Or, just knock the ref over, whoops, it’ll take some time for him to get up. It’s not soccer as professional wrestling, despite the Danielson namedrop, but it’s not not soccer as professional wrestling. If the ref does see you with a straight shot to the face or a knee to the back, however, you will be carded. A yellow for the first two, then a red, then three more yellows before next red, then another three before the final red. You are very unlikely to receive more than a single yellow in a match unless you are very bad at hiding your misdeeds, though.

The reason for that, beyond that it is, again, a simple matter to outrun the stout little referee, is because these matches are short. You have two minutes to score some goals, and if you either play to a draw or lose, you get another chance to play the same team, though, it will of course cost you another credit to attempt it. If you somehow rack up 11 fouls in sight of the referee in two minutes, then you weren’t trying to do anything else with that time. You’ll need to score at least once, so save a few precious seconds for attempts at that.

Before you can start playing in a match, though, you have to pick a team. You can select from a group of eight international squads: Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain. That’s in North America, at least. Hat Trick Hero, the Japanese release of Football Champ, swaps in Japan and the United States in place of France and Spain; Euro Football Champ, to no one’s surprise, remains as Eurocentric as possible in its team options.

After you pick a team, you have to choose one of four stars to be your main player. You can control anyone on the pitch on offense and defense by cycling between them and taking control of whichever one has the ball at a given time, but this player — whose face shows up on your screen when in possession of the ball instead of just their number — serves a particular purpose: they can fire a special shot to score a goal when there are 30 seconds or fewer left on the clock, and the game is tied or you are down by a single goal. It’s not quite that simple, as each of the four player correspond to different positions on the field and therefore different places where they can pull off this Super Shot, but you can either figure these locations out by trial and error, or check out a YouTube video to see them in action and go from there.

Like this one, which breaks down the where and what of the various Super Shots, all of which strike a keeper so hard that they are sent back through the net and into the walls behind it. Football Champ is not serious business, but that’s what makes it work.

It’s very easy to play Football Champ without knowing these Super Shots exist because you’re never in the right place at the right time with the right player, but once you do know, you suddenly have something to strive for. And, in conjunction with the running knees and the punching, the Super Shots make for a hilarious game with a friend, where you are trying not to get caught inflicting cartoonish violence on the opposition whenever they are nearing a Super Shot spot, or really anywhere that will give them a chance to score. See? It’s really important to not get caught even if the penalty for doing so is fairly limited.

Football Champ is loaded with character. The faces of every team manager are horrid in their own little way, with near-permanent smugness plastered on, only occasionally replaced with a purer joy after a goal or despair at having given one up. The players you can select as captains, well, they aren’t exactly the super-attractive visages you’re used to seeing from your professional footballers. You can knock over a cameraman with an errant kick to the left or right of the goal, and you get to watch them just topple over as the whistle blows. There has to be a safer way to take photos, but then again, there is probably a safer way to play soccer than the one that Football Champ espouses.

The single-player gives you plenty to do, as Football Champ gets difficult in a hurry given the limited time you have to outscore your opponent. You have to defeat the seven other teams, in order, and the difficulty increases with each victory. In addition, the game pays attention to when you score a hat trick with a single player — that’s three goals — and ups the difficulty following one of those, as well. Again, there is no extra time or shootout, just two minutes to be ahead in a very, very arcade-style soccer game, or else you have to try again.

While the teams all play similarly and there are no real players within, the various squads are tiered in terms of the difficulty you will face them at. Spain and France (or Japan and the United States) are basically your warm-up opponents to start, then Brazil or the Netherlands. Once those two are both taken care of, it’s one of England or Italy first and the other second, then you have to down Argentina and Germany in whatever order the game presents them in. Whichever team you play isn’t part of that, of course, but the relative order is similar each time through the game, even if within a two-team tier that can swap on each run.

The easiest way to get through Germany and Argentina? Play as one of them so that you don’t have to handle both. The game truly gets difficult at that point, but at least in the present, when feeding a cabinet quarters isn’t a necessity in order to play Football Champ, you can lose some of the frustration and just keep at it until you’re a Super Shot machine, or at least capable of setting up kicks that will have the keeper out of position and unable to defend. Despite the later difficulty, Football Champ is very simple to pick up and play, since defense can be a matter of kneeing a guy in the back from behind when the ref isn’t around, and offense is as simple as pressing one button for a pass and another for a shot. Learn when to do which, and you’ll be moving the ball up the pitch and toward a perspiring keeper in no time.

Football Champ has been re-released on a couple of occasions since 1990. First as part of Taito’s multi-release collection in the aughts for the Playstation 2, Xbox, and Windows, in the second of two volumes. The more recent and more modern release is through Hamster’s Arcade Archives on the Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch, with those games available as well on the Playstation 5 and Switch 2. This one gets you online leaderboards, all kinds of options for difficulty, button mapping, display, and more, as well as access to both Football Champ and the Japanese release, Hat Trick Hero. There is, as per usual for Hamster’s series, also a score specifically for High Score which follows a set of specific rules and doesn’t allow you to pause while playing — just like in the arcade! — as well as a Caravan mode.

There’s more Football Champ than ever before, if you want to think of it that way, but there was plenty of it the first time around, too. This game is difficult but rewarding, a complete goof that’s also serious in the right ways, because it might joke around but doesn’t treat soccer like the sport itself is a joke. Taito made space for sports games like this one from the beginning, and you should, too.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

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