1978 · Atari, Inc. · American football · Arcade

Atari Football

Atari Football is a 2-player 1978 arcade game in which the sport of American football is accurately emulated, with players represented by Xs and Os. The game was one of the most popular arcade games in its day and is credited with popularizing the trackball. Twenty-five cents would allow 90 seconds of playtime, while adding more quarters would allow longer play. Considered physically exhausting to play, Atari Football involves spinning the trackball as fast as possible to win the game. Just 90 seconds of play could result in sore palms, and longer could cause blisters.

Released: 1 October 1978
Platforms: Arcade
Genres: American football Arcade Sports
Developers: Atari, Inc.
Publishers: —
Modes: Multiplayer Single-player
Perspective: Third person Bird view / Isometric
Themes: Non-fiction
Country: United States
Languages: English

About

Football (also known as Atari Football) is a 1978 American football video game developed and released by Atari, Inc. for arcades. Players are represented by X's and O's. While predated by Sega's World Cup, Football is credited with popularizing the trackball controller and is also the first non-racing vertically scrolling video game. It was distributed in Japan by Namco in 1979.

Football was the second highest-earning arcade video game of 1979 in the United States. That year Atari released a more challenging four-player version of the arcade game programmed by Dave Theurer, who later created Missile Command and Tempest.

Keywords

football
american football
vertical scrolling
trackball

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Development

The game was designed by Steve Bristow and programmed by Michael Albaugh, with the hardware engineered by Dave Stubben. The game's use of a trackball was inspired by an earlier Japanese association football (soccer) game that had used trackball controls. When the team saw the game, they brought a cabinet to their lab and imitated the trackball controls.

An earlier association football game that used trackball controls was Sega's World Cup, released seven months earlier in March 1978, but in 2001 Steven L. Kent reported that Stubben attributed the earlier trackball soccer game to Taito. In a later 2017 interview, Albaugh said he was uncertain which company it was from, but remembers it was from a Japanese company.