Insert Coin to Continue, a history of football video games, part one: Origin of the Species, 1958-1983

From a curio on an oscilloscope to a crash which almost strangled the medium just as it was building up momentum, the history of video games featured football from close to its beginning.

As threatened promised recently, the start of a number of new series rewritten and re-edited from the now deceased 200% archives. For Monday nights over the next eight weeks, this is Insert Coin to Continue, a history of football video games.

Video games, despite the best efforts of those who would wish otherwise, are not going anywhere. It’s now been a little over four full decades since arcade games were properly brought into homes with the release of the Atari 2600 console, and football has been at the centre of this culture since more or less the very beginning. So, what better way for us to mark this than by reaching back into the dim and distant history of video gaming to bring you something like a fairly comprehensive history of the game as displayed through pixels and sprites?

Sport has been at the heart of video gaming since its very introduction. Released (briefly – it was a diversion rather than anything to form the basis of an industry on) in 1958, Tennis For Two, a two-player tennis game for which the viewing screen was an oscilloscope, is widely considered to be the very first purpose-built video game of any description (as you might expect, even the question of what amounts to the first ‘video game’ is contentious’) while Pong, the first game to truly break through and into the wider marketplace, also relied on tennis for its inspiration. With the majority of games development taking place in the United States of America and Japan, we might have expected the early development of sports video games to have overlooked our particular sport. But this turned out not to be the case.