Pele's Soccer

Pele's Soccer used the name of the famous Brazilian footballer Pelé in 1981 to promote one of the first soccer matches on the Atari 2600. The player controls one team member at a time, runs around a pitch shown from a bird's-eye view, passes to computer-controlled teammates, and tries to get the ball past the opposing goalkeeper, while the computer or a second player on a second controller controls the other side. The choice between playing against the computer and dueling a second human player gave the title solid replay value even after the first few matches were played.

The controls are necessarily simplified to movement and a single button for passing or shooting, yet the game still managed to evoke the basic feel of a soccer contest – chasing the ball, exploiting a numerical advantage on the wing, and trying to reach a favorable scoring position in front of the goal. The teammates' artificial intelligence tried to offer itself up for a pass, even though from today's perspective these are only very simple behavior patterns. The graphics correspond to the console's early years – the players are small colorful figures and the pitch is simply marked out with lines with no stands or crowd, but the movement of the ball and the figures is legible, and the game remains playable even with the small number of colors the Atari 2600 could display on screen at once, without the pronounced sprite flicker that plagued many contemporary games with a larger number of characters on screen.

The use of Pelé's name was one of the first attempts to marketingly tie a sports game to a real star of the given sport, which later became a common and widely used practice in the genre. Pele's Soccer feels archaic today compared to later soccer simulations, but as an early attempt to bring the world's most popular sport to a home console it has a solid place in the history of the genre and is a reminder of a time when sports games were still finding their shape and a way to depict a beloved team sport as faithfully as possible on a small screen.

Why play it: As an early attempt to bring the world's most popular sport to a home console and the first marketing tie-in between a game and a real sports star, Pele's Soccer holds a solid place in the genre's history, its archaic feel today notwithstanding.