A game released by Commodore for Commodore 64 in 1983 (very early in Commodore 64 history!). Written by Andrew B. Spencer. (Apparently released somewhere else as "International Football", but IS appear to be more common and this is what C64GG.com filed it under =)

"And there's an atmosphere of great festival of sports around us..."

So it's a soccer game for one or two players. Nothing special about it.

What makes it so "international"? The only text on screen is in credits screen and in the Commodore "ads" on the sides of the playing field. The rest is merely symbolic. You can pick the shirt colors of your players, and choose between a 2-player game and computer opponent (9 difficulty levels). Curiously enough, this game also has specific "black and white" mode for people with such televisions. (It was 1983, anyway...)

The graphics of the game are pretty coarse, because the programming techniques had not got that amazing yet and Commodore had more experience making computers, not games - but it has all stuff that a soccer game needs. Cheering audience (civilized bunch, everyone sits in neat rows, supporters of both teams next to each other - apparently hooliganism wasn't a big issue back then =), blocky ball, players that are each constructed from one multi-color sprite (?), scoreboard with clock (200 seconds per round). And, when the game ends, the winning team comes back to the field and an attractive lady hands the captain a golden cup. =)

Overall, the game was pretty simple but yet, even when better soccer games have come out for many many platforms, this one has been one of the best. It's also pretty good in C64 point of view - most later released soccer games had top-down view, which was vastly more challenging than the isometric view used by this game.

The game was distributed on a cartridge. It was apparently also sold with machines; I know Commodore 64G was sold with a cartridge that had this game (along with two other games) and so was Commodore 64GS - but the GS cartridge version was modified so that it didn't need a keyboard to change settings (the original uses function keys in settings screen).

VICE emulates the game near-perfectly (there's some glitch stuff in the right edge of the screen, but that doesn't matter...)

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