Street Soccer

Oh bitterest of ironies! Oh heaviest of deeds! As Scottish football struggles to awaken from a 30 year old dream of Baxters and Bremners and 3-2 at Wembley - as players and politicians alike point to the phenomenon of video gaming as the root cause of Scottish youth's disinterest in developing their skills at The Beautiful Game - those of us who are old (and young) enough to have marched at the forehead of the gaming gamut may well remember the game which could very well be said to have started it all, removing football from the streets and cul-de-sacs in which it was a technical misdemeanour, and setting it gently down in the avenues and boulevards of our mind. Scottish football's loss was very much Codemasters' gain, as they unleashed upon the world their inaugural, ground-breaking blurring of the boundaries between reality and fiction: Street Soccer.

More or less identical, in game mechanics, to Codemasters' other soccer games of the period, Street Soccer put a Roberto Carlos-esq spin on the concept by setting the play in that arena with which we poverty-stricken youngsters, kicking a tennis ball around the slums of Scotland, were most familiar: not the lush green of newly relaid turf, nor the sneaker-squeaking shine of indoor facilities, but the grey and irregular concrete of the very street we lived on, right down to its parked cars, wall-chalked goalposts and encroaching garden walls! Oh! OH! It's all so EXCITING! We want a nice clean match, no spitting, no toe-bashes, and LOTS of variety! KICK OFF!

Like almost every football game ever created, Street Soccer had a fair old number of foolproof ways to score goals which, once discovered and developed, reduced the game to an end-to-end variety of Pong- but anybody who complained that it was all too easy to get the ball, put your head down and run RIGHT UP to the goalmouth before tapping home to make the score 16-14 after 3 minutes of play obviously had never played street football before. The ludicrious ease with which one was able to knock the ball past the permanently grounded goalies and the complete absence of passing were testaments to the game's absolute fidelity to the spirit and ethos of street soccer, players gaining possession and selfishly sprinting upfield there to either be mauled by a ruck of opposition players or to slip the ball beyond the grasp of a goalkeeper who had wisely chosen NOT to hurl his fragile frame across the Smith's concrete driveway. This uncompromising, unflinching commitment to exposing the grim and vicious underbelly of street football went some way towards making up for the myriad of undeveloped ideas in the game. The physical obstacles in the game were simply that, obstacles, to be dribbled around or past- thumping the parked car with the ball didn't set off an ear-piercing alarm which scattered the participants to the winds like confetti, nor did punting the ball over the garden wall lead to hushed but vitriolic arguments about whose turn it was to go fetch it being resolved by the immutable "Who hits it, gits it" rule. There was no special indicator hanging over the head of the player to whom the ball belonged, intimating that excessive use of force in dispossessing him would result in the sulky snatching up of his spherical chattel and a tearful prognostication of his gawin' hame if he didnae git a penalty; nor did any flashy display single out the blacksheep, the younger brother of one of the players whose brief was to run about irritating everyone else by entirely failing to notice their tacit agreement to completely ignore him. Street Soccer had a lot of these frustratingly unexpanded potentialities- but there was one touch that made up for them all.

Now, the calling of fouls in unsophisticated Spectrum soccer games was, at the best of times, arbitrary, and generally amounted to a small percentage chance that ANY challenge, fair or foul, would be penalised. Street Soccer turned this system on its head by actually EMBRACING this arbitrariness- whether or not a foul was given depended not only on whether the Wheel of BS spinning inside the CPU actually fell in your favour for once, but also on whether or not the other players accepted the call or simply ignored it. To any youngster who had ever sat, whimpering and tearful and rubbing his poor shin in the middle of the road as his black-hearted aggressor roared off onto the horizon with a scream of "PLAY ON!", Street Soccer's bitter cynicism and open acknowledgement of the inherent unfairness of life struck a chord since unmatched by any of its followers.