Insert Coin to Continue, a history of football video games, part two: from necessity to modernity, 1980-1983

In Britain video games would truly break through with home micros rather than consoles, and football was there from the very start.

Just as in America, the crucible within which computing grew in the United Kingdom was the scientific community. At a certain critical juncture, though, the British video game would become something subtly different to its mainstream American counterpart. Video games would become computer games. It’s not that there weren’t home computers in America that could run games. The Commodore PET, the Apple II and the TRS-80 spring immediately to mind. It’s more that the console culture of the Atari 2600 era didn’t stick here in quite the same way.