Football (video game)
Football is a 1978 List of [American football video games|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.
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 List of [association football video games|association football 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 List of [Sega arcade video games|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.
Atari's Football was released in October 1978.