Soccer Arcade Games Through the Years

I was surprised not to see Sensible Soccer here, it was massive in the 90's (at least in the UK). Turns out it was never released as an arcade cabinet. I think they missed a trick there, it was arcade style and a lot of fun in two player mode.

I used to love arcade stations when I was young. I remember in one holiday somewhere in a spanish-speaking country (it was either Spain or the canary islands, though naturally the latter is still Spain, but it is quite different to e. g. Barcelona), I played one arcade game a ton, with ninjas; and there was some odd bug where I did not need to insert new coins, but the resulting gameplay also was non-legit aka non-default, it had some weird bugs that you would not see when you paid properly.

These days I am way too old for arcade games and, even more importantly, lack time, but also they kind of died out, which is a bit sad. Smartphones aren't quite the same to big arcade games. It's a very different vibe now and I feel the younger generation has kind of lost something here (even if one could argue they also won more flexibility thanks to smartphones, but the point is that it is different).

I did not get into soccer arcade games though; only played some DOS soccer games. They aren't quite as interesting as combat arcade games IMO.

Not an arcade game but Nintendo World Cup on the NES is excellent fun even today. Its japan-only sequel takes it even further with crazy nonsense, like being able to jump on top of the ball and run around on it

I'm surprised there haven't been more releases along the lines of Konami's old WE/PES units, which essentially take a console football game and drop it in an arcade cabinet.

I'm not a basketball fan, but I've had some great fun playing arcadey NBA equivalents with friends and colleagues. It's a shame there aren't similar options for football.

No Striker? [0] Zero realism but incredibly fun to play. IIRC it had a two-player mode (sharing the keyboard) that was super fun.

[0] https://www.mobygames.com/game/12380/striker/

I didn't see on the list the NES games based on the Captain Tsubasa anime. While technically soccer, they can be better described as RPGs in soccer form where players have energy, special attacks, and so on.

The first tabletop soccer game was from Spain:

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futbol%C3%ADn

Meta: Is there any way to disable to continually distracting bouncing blue circle at the bottom-right of the page (short of using an element/script blocker or something)?

I really liked the first Virtua Striker. It is pretty limited but can be fun in small doses even today. There is a PS3 port and of course Mame if you want to try it out!

with the advent of NEOgeo everything changed, Super Side Kick, Goal Goal Goal and other wonderful games, often with a 4 players cabinet!

Oh man! Exciting Soccer unlocked a memory from my childhood. The deep booming sound effects and speech synthesis ...

The Japanese team in Tecmo World Cup 98 was really good. The goalkeeper's skills were excellent

> I’d have to imagine that a modern VS would sell better than Virtua Tennis 4 did (assuming it was good).

I mean, no. Virtua Striker is fun for maybe 5 minutes, while Virtua Tennis is sublime, especially in multiplayer.

For couch multiplayer one of the few games better than Virtua Tennis 2 is Beach Spikers, which is to volleyball what Virtua Tennis is to tennis.

you mean football?