Sports fans will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars each year on merchandise, game tickets, and TV subscriptions, just so that they can cheer on their favorite team. In the United States, the professional sports market is now worth around $80 billion a year, around eight times more than Hollywood.
Online sports betting has recently taken off in the country too, helping to push that figure even higher. Fans in around 24 states can now place wagers on games and other markets for professional and collegiate sports. Sportsbooks are even offering risk-free bets for new customers which will help them to grow the industry even further in the coming years.
Another area where fans have been spending their money is on video games. For decades, games have provided them the opportunity to step into the shoes of their favorite athletes and recreate the action they’ve watched on TV.
One of the most successful franchises is EA Sports’ soccer game FIFA. Today, its 4K graphics and motion-captured physics help to create the most realistic experience possible on current hardware. This is a far cry from the origins of soccer video games.
The First Soccer Game
The first soccer dedicated soccer game was NASL Soccer from Mattel. It was incredibly primitive with players represented by tiny stick figures and a lot of static passing, but it was revolutionary for its time.
nternational Soccer
International Soccer for the Commodore 64 made a big step forward with improved animation, animated crowds, and players that resembled actual people much more closely. The play was still very slow though and the fumbling of the ball around the goal would often be comical.
The Birth of the FIFA Franchise
FIFA International Soccer was EA Sports’ first officially licensed soccer game. Graphics were more realistic, play was faster, and the sounds were more reflective of what you’d hear at a real match.
From the late 1990s onwards, a new version of FIFA has been released each year. There isn’t a major step forward each time, sometimes only iterative improvements are made, but the cumulative advancements have made modern soccer games unrecognizable from their forebears.
Licensing agreements and modern technology have actually made these games so realistic that they are sometimes mistaken for the real thing. During Euro 2020, an American woman took to TikTok to show her father watching a PES match between Denmark instead of a real-life match.
With the pace of technological improvements, it seems pretty safe to assume that soccer video games will continue to get closer and closer to reality.
