Great Soccer

Great Soccer is a football game from the Great sports series that Sega released for the Master System and its Japanese predecessor, the Mark III, in the second half of the 1980s as part of a broader, systematically built sports lineup. The player controls one of the national teams and tries to beat the opponent in a match using simple but functional football mechanics — passing between players, shooting on goal, and taking the ball from the opponent during their own defensive phase. The pitch is shown from a bird's-eye view, a common and technically undemanding way of presenting football matches on home consoles and personal computers of that generation at the time.

The controls are simplified and match the capabilities of the Master System's two-button controller of the time, so the game focuses on basic football situations without complex tactical elements or team formations, which only came with much later generations of sports simulations on more powerful consoles. Still, Great Soccer offers solid fun in two-player mode, where two players can compete directly against each other on a shared controller, which was one of the main draws of sports titles on 8-bit consoles at the time and noticeably extended their lifespan and popularity among players and their friends.

Today Great Soccer is seen mainly as a historical record of the early stage of sports video games on Sega platforms, when graphical and gameplay possibilities were still quite limited, but demand for football simulations was already growing worldwide, and with it competition among manufacturers. For fans of retro sports titles, it's an interesting glimpse into an era when football games were still finding their visual and gameplay language and gradually experimenting with how to bring a team sport onto a family's small TV screen at home without the player losing track of the action on the pitch.

Why play it: For retro sports game fans curious how football games were still finding their visual and gameplay language in the early days of sports simulations on Sega consoles.