Each new instalment of FIFA and PES, EA Sports’ and Konami’s respective football video game franchises, brings much talk of “player impact engines”, “updated facial representations” and “true-to-life active AI”. Whatever that actually means, there’s no doubt both games are thoroughly impressive technological achievements, presenting frighteningly realistic football simulations with all the bells and whistles a fan could want. But football games have much humbler origins.
The first football video game was a variation on the primitive Pong “bat-and-ball” game, and was bundled with TV games systems like the ubiquitous Binatone TV Master in the 1970s. Binatone Football bore very little resemblance to today’s console games, with no colour, rudimentary sound, and no graphics to speak of. Nevertheless, it was revolutionary, allowing fans to play an electronic version of their favourite sport in their front rooms, and kick-starting the rapid development of football video games over the next 30-plus years…
Trawling through football history books over the weekend I came across a quite unusual photograph. This was in the excellent Football: The Golden Age by John Tennant.
The photo shows three men tying a mangey toy cat to a railing on a ship. One of the men is wearing a black and white rosette. They’re being watched by the ship’s captain and another crew member. The caption reads: “SS ‘Bernicia’ takes Newcastle United mascot ‘Felix’ to London for the FA Cup Final against Aston Villa, April 1924.”
The photo struck me as unusual for several reasons, the main one being that Felix is a black cat. The black cat is a mascot of Newcastle’s local rivals Sunderland. Newcastle’s traditional mascot is, of course, the magpie. So why would Newcastle fans choose a black cat as a mascot? Read more…
How North Korea won Asian Cup qualification, and hearts and minds, at the AFC Challenge Cup.
There is a mythical creature in Korean legend named the Chollima, which roughly translates as ‘thousand-mile horse’. It’s a winged beast – a Korean Pegasus – strong, swift and elegant. The Chollima is used as a symbol in North Korea to represent strength, heroism and fighting spirit. A 150-foot-tall statue of the Chollima stands over the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. And Chollima is the nickname of the North Korean football team. North Korea (some say DPR Korea) retained the AFC Challenge Cup tournament in Nepal this week, displaying many of the qualities associated with their mythical symbol…
The remarkable tale of the unlikely friendship between a besotted fan and the greatest fighter of all time.
How a lad from England befriended Muhammad Ali, King of the Ring, sparking an unlikely lifelong camaraderie.
Muhammad Ali is a fast driver. He guns the Stutz Bearcat along Wilshire Boulevard, swinging in and out of busy traffic. Pedestrians point and wave, and Ali lifts his hands from the steering wheel to throw shadow punches in their direction. Stopped at a red, a driver leans from his car window and shouts, “Hey Ali – you’re the greatest!” Ali bites down on his Louisville lip and offers the driver a comic grimace. Then, as the light turns, the man they call the Champ hits the gas.
Riding shotgun next to Ali is Russ Routledge, a 26-year-old British Telecom engineer from Newcastle upon Tyne…
Read the full story in Air magazine issue ten, March 2012.
Each new instalment of FIFA and PES, EA Sports’ and Konami’s respective football video game franchises, brings much talk of “player impact engines”, “updated facial representations” and “true-to-life active AI”. Whatever that actually means, there’s no doubt both games are thoroughly impressive technological achievements, presenting frighteningly realistic football simulations with all the bells and whistles a fan could want. But football games have much humbler origins. 
by John Tennant. 
