Weaponized Soccer is an underutilized game mechanic

Weaponized Soccer is an underutilized game mechanic

A pitch-perfect action engagement dynamic.

The World Cup has reached America, bringing all the love and joy that fans of the sport bring along with it. It’s also brought the awareness that there’s a larger world out there.  Even the use of the word “America” here was just referring to North America, which leaves out an entire other continent in its definition… one where soccer happens to be extremely popular.

At this very moment, soccer fans from South and Central America, Europe, Australia, and just about every country on Earth have descended upon [North] America to see their soccer teams compete. Except that unless they’re from Japan, they don’t even call it Soccer over there! Just about everyone outside of [North] American calls it football. It is, in fact, the biggest sport of all time, with an estimated 3.5 billion fans across the globe.

Why is it so beloved? The specifics are hard to pin down, but the fact that you get to kick a ball really hard until it smashes into something (ideally your opponent’s goal, though their face also works in a pinch) probably has something to do with it. It’s universally appealing. Kicking a ball is something just about anyone can do. More importantly, it just feels good.

So why aren’t soccer mechanics used in more video games? We shoot, run, jump, throw, and punch things in games all the time, but kicking things, balls or otherwise, shows up far less often. Maybe it’s because game developers don’t think the massive North American game market likes soccer enough to risk going all in with weaponized soccer mechanics. However, those who have taken that risk have landed on some really joyful results.

In 1993, there was a big push to cash in on soccer’s global popularity through a multi-media project called The Hurricanes. Starting with a cartoon show about the adventures of a team of international soccer players, The Hurricanes took a shot at becoming the next big thing. It did pretty well in its native Scotland, though it only survived a year on U.S. television before cancellation. Just as it was cut from the airwaves, the show got its own Super NES/Genesis tie-in game, with art and animation that was arguably better than the TV show’s. With a variety of different balls to collect, enemies to take out (including hummingbirds, frogs, bees, and bubblegum-chewing children), and a variety of environments to explore, The Hurricanes is a hidden gem in the larger pantheon of 16-bit action platformers.

A few years later we saw an even bigger soccer-action adventure in Go! Go! Beckham! Adventure on Soccer Island, a 2002 title for the Gameboy Advance. Instead of being based on a TV show of mixed popularity, this handheld exclusive used superstar David Beckham (albeit a strange, cartoon-like kid version of him) to bring in audiences. It did a great job of taking the feel of Yoshi’s Island and crunching it down into something less complex, which anyone could manage. Not unlike The Hurricanes, it used the classic Amiga game Soccer Kid as inspiration, allowing young David to use his kicks and tricks to traverse the environment, collect gold coins, and take out blobby enemies along the way. It did great in Europe, but it wasn’t even released in other regions.

Even before Go! Go! Beckham, one major publisher had already attempted to integrate soccer-based action into a marquee release: Capcom’s Mega Man 8 for Sega Saturn and PlayStation. It was, as most would agree, a weird one. Among many other curveball creative decisions was the choice to give Mega Man an explosive ball as his secondary form of attack from the very start. While it’s not explicitly called a “soccer ball”, the fact that Mega can only kick it (or jump on it, as a treat) makes it pretty clear which sport inspired it. It’s also hinted to be a carryover from Mega Man’s ill-fated foray into hitting the field himself: Mega Man Soccer, the Blue Bomber’s debut on Super Nintendo, had launched a few years earlier, marking his first attempt to make the leap into the sports world. Despite being a novel experiment, it lacked the spark that made his prior adventures so riveting.

Mega Man wasn’t alone as a video game hero who struck out with a career as a striker. Misako of River City Girls fame actually got her start in a soccer-based spin-off. She was created for Nekketsu Koukou Dodgeball-bu Soccer-hen for the Famicom, the fourth game in the Kunio-Kun/River City series. Unfortunately, that game had nearly all of its Kunio-related fun stripped from its branding when it eventually came west in the form of Nintendo World Cup. But localization edits can’t keep a Soccer-lovin’ girl down forever. While she doesn’t explicitly talk much about the sport in the River City Girls series, she can still kick balls (this time, dodgeballs) into people’s faces until they barf. Her would-be boyfriend Kunio also has a move called the “Soccer Charge”, showing that he too can’t forget his athletically violent past.

There’s also the Mario Strikers series, which essentially turns soccer into a team fighting game; the secret soccer ball you can take to the field in GTA5; the Izanuma Eleven manga/anime/game series; and the ability to play a wonky-but-sweet versions of the sport in various entries in the Scribblenauts franchise. Taking all that in, it feels more certain that there’s huge potential for soccer-based action gameplay to be unleashed upon the world. Developers and publishers just need to know that there’s a big enough audience for them. So go cheer on your favorite team at the World Cup this year and show them that you’re ready to see your next videogame purchase be fully soccer-ified.