FFootball, like everything important in life, is about stories. People implant themselves in the narrative: where they were when they saw Maradona’s hand, the strangers they hugged when Ole Gunnar Solskjær scored that historic last-minute goal in the 1999 Champions League final. conjuring new stories around Jude Bellingham’s scissor kick against Slovakia in the dying seconds of Sunday’s Euro 24 match. Sports are a nostalgia machine, and this is as true for video game simulations as it is for the real thing. Every player has his favorite soccer simulator, but for me, and for many other players in my… ahem, classic… it was Pro Evolution Soccer, numbers 3 to 6.
It was the early 2000s, the era of the PlayStation 2. I was a contract editor at Future Publishing and basically hung out in their Bath office, working mainly on the official PlayStation magazine. But every lunchtime, all the magazines would get together and play PES, especially during the big tournaments, where we would organize our own versions. FIFA? Forget it. Konami had already proven its prowess with soccer games through the excellent International Superstar Soccer series on Mega Drive, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, but the introduction of PES in 2001 brought with it a new level of dynamism and detail. The pacing was fluid, player abilities were defined by 45 different stats, adding depth and variety, the controls were intuitive yet expansive. “These games felt like real football,” says Ben Wilson, who was editor of the official PlayStation magazine at the time. “There was genuine joy in achieving a 1-0 victory. Modern football games have as much in common with basketball as they do with soccer: you shoot, I shoot, you shoot, I shoot, final score 6-4.”
There were no flashy special moves to select, any moment of magic was contextual. You had to work for them. “A game developer once described PES to me as a series of split-second Street Fighter 2 battles that take place across the entire field, over the course of minutes,” says Dan Dawkins, now chief content officer at GamesRadar. but then Future’s unofficial PlayStation deputy editor. magazine, PSM. “The game made each player feel completely unique, and the ultra-precise controls made every moment of the game a series of high-speed, chess-style tactical decisions about how to beat the opponent and advance the ball, all based on the player’s attributes. relative. of each player.”
Now, watching the Euros, I can’t help but remember those days. A dozen of us would gather around the huge CRT TV in the office games room, which was an old storage cupboard, complete with a metal mesh door, earning it the name The Games Cage. “I have so many amazing and ridiculous memories,” says Dawkins. “We used to refer to players as if they were teammates. ‘Use Eddie (Edgar Davids) to shore up the middle!’, ‘A curling shot from Bertie (Roberto Carlos)!’ We even developed our own lexicon for each version of the game’s quirks, such as Captain Pan Hands, for when goalkeepers would inexplicably miss a shot, or Jimmy Ghost Legs, when your defender would let an attacker virtually walk through him.” Meanwhile, I earned the nickname Mr. Chips, due to my obsession with trying to get a shot over the head of every goalie I faced.
And I’m sure we weren’t the only ones thinking how heated events could get, especially given the intensity of the game and its unique ability to simulate the absolute unpredictability of the sport. “Probably my fondest memory is the day when the unofficial PlayStation Magazine (PSM2) that I used to work at, beat the official PlayStation Magazine 9-1 in a co-op match,” Dawkins says. “Magnananimous to the end, we paraded a small trophy around the office and kept a Mini-DV recording of the match on our desk titled ‘A Fistful of Dellas’, in tribute to the Greek Roma defender who scored our ninth goal with a header. ”. And what happened to that video evidence? “We caught the footage on one of the PSM cover albums,” recalls Nathan Irvine, who worked on PSM with Dan. “Yes, we were that petty.”
Over the next five iterations of the game, the team at Konami gradually refined their take on the football simulation, adding new animations and movements but never altering the core of the game: complexity and unpredictability. Player control was “limited” to eight directional movements, but, as in Street Fighter, this provided a highly reflexive level of control. “The d-pad was really the best way to play,” says Dawkins. “Later, FIFA introduced ‘real’ player movement on the 360, but for many years this had the effect of floating, compared to the surgical precision of PES’s movements. For all the simplifications and limitations of control, it just wasn’t as good as it used to be.” felt Like football: an illusion of control in a sandbox of chaos. It had the ability to crush you with moments of player ineptitude, or fill you with euphoria when a striker lunged in for a wide cross at the last second.
Even the game’s eccentricities were endearing. Konami famously obtained fewer official licences than FIFA, so Manchester City were Man Blue, West Ham were inexplicably Lake District and Kenny Dalglish was known simply as Durlmints. “PES made up for this by offering the most comprehensive editing mode of any game, allowing players to correct all names and appearances of athletes to microscopic detail,” says Dawkins. “The internet was a different place in 2003, and the PES fan community – PES fans, PES Gaming, Reddit – would be packed with players sharing fully updated save game files, making the game even more accurate than FIFA. This culminated in the legally dubious existence of ‘Magic PES’, as I recall, where fans shared fully downloadable, illegal versions of the game with all licences corrected. We had a few copies floating around the office for ‘research purposes’.”
You could say PES 6 was the culmination of that period – the Brazil 1970 of football sims. While fans will champion PES 2013 or PES 2017, PES 6 was the last to lead the way on the PlayStation 2 before the series jumped to the PlayStation 3 with the heartbreakingly mediocre PES 2008. The buzz that swept through Future’s office when a gold disc version arrived; the furtive whispers, everyone checking their watches, waiting for lunch. The sound of various magazine production schedules grinding to a halt.
after newsletter promotion
“This, to me, is the pinnacle of the football video game,” Irvine says. “Anything could happen in that version, which generated incredible passages of play and goals. Oh, and I won the PES Media Cup in Dublin in PES 6. The PES Media Cup? Yeah, that was a thing. “It was a time when PES was everywhere; it had incredible awareness and we knew we had to take advantage of it,” says Steve Merrett, then head of PR for Konami in the UK. “Our official Media Cup started with 16 people in a London pub, and within four years had 64 participants and hundreds of liggers as venues ranged from wine cellars to suites in the Emirates. We did everything we could to support all forms of press and we knew in particular how Future had embraced it. I probably talked to Dan Dawkins more than my wife back then…”
PES 6 was released in April 2006, just before the World Cup in Germany. “Once he arrived, we spent the next few days crowded in the cage playing against each other,” Irvine says. “The magazines around us scolded us for being too loud. I may sound like an angry old man, but the magic of PES, especially 5 and 6, has not been matched. The graphics have improved and the licenses now put you on the field with your favorite players, but creating memorable moments out of thin air has been left to the locker room. In an effort to be ultra-realistic, they have actually become boring and predictable. In PES, it seemed like the ball could go anywhere. A simple drop of the shoulder or a feint of a shot to pass an opponent required real skill and skill. juice We like football. Not like the 300 pirouettes and rainbows of today.”
There was something very PES 4-6 about Bellingham’s goal. It didn’t seem choreographed like it would have been in FIFA. It came out of nowhere, out of nowhere; a moment of instinct and fortune, perfectly calculated. Until then he had been cynical about the tournament, but after the match he just wanted to play PES. He wanted to score a goal with a goalkeeper. He wanted it to be 2006 again.
