KICKER, The Other Football Simulation

The origins of KICKER go back to a programming experiment. In the mid-1980s, we (Bernd, Dirk and Frank) had been addicted to the game “Football Manager” on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum for months. My ‘little’ brother Dirk, still a teenager, had the idea to develop a German version inspired by this grandfather of all football manager games.

He tinkered with making this vision a reality on his Atari 600 XL. Unfortunately, the implementation failed simply due to lack of memory – the Atari had just 16 kilobytes. But at least: match results were calculated based on a team model with various parameters, or – as he puts it today – rolled like dice. The team lineup and a few tables were already implemented. But that was as far as it went.

Dirk’s confirmation and generous relatives from Switzerland then made it possible to acquire an Atari ST computer. An absolute dream machine! With that, there was no more excuse about RAM. Dirk started a new attempt and first ported the algorithm for calculating results.

Instead of relaxing and doing nothing, my little brother spent the summer holidays of 1988 coding KICKER from early morning until late at night on his ST. The nights were especially short because Bernd, Dirk and I (Frank) preferred to use them for extensive play and test sessions. Many new game ideas were conceived during these sessions and often implemented by Dirk the very next day.

The programming language of choice was the then very popular GFA-Basic 2.0. Dirk was self-taught. The semi-structured code looked accordingly – memory management, meaningful variable names or inline documentation? None of that! Yet GFA-Basic offered enough possibilities to realise Dirk’s vision and just barely manage its complexity.

Two features were implemented via external assembler libraries: the freely scalable and pixel-precise font, and the (theoretically possible) 16-colour sprites for displaying match highlights at the end of each matchday. These were contributed by an older programming colleague of Dirk’s – special thanks to Oliver Merklinghaus!

Incidentally, the library “iconomic” and its sprite editor by Dirk were the “Listing of the Month” in the Atari Magazine, January 1989 issue.

At some point KICKER was “finished” and distributed among friends and acquaintances. How KICKER reached the famous German gaming magazine ASM is not entirely clear. It was featured in their “Microwelle” column in the August/September 1990 issue.

Around the same time, the company Micropartner (operating under the Magic Bytes label) offered to market KICKER professionally. Unfortunately nothing came of it, as the company failed to port the game to other platforms. The contract was dissolved at the end of 1990.

A few months later, Dirk managed to publish a reader’s letter in ASM announcing that KICKER would be offered as shareware in self-distribution. To save your game, you had to purchase a manual with save code table for 30 DM. Shortly afterwards, the first orders trickled in. From memory, up to 100 copies were sold. KICKER was also distributed on various shareware CDs of the time.

In early 1991, the German games company Starbyte Software took notice of our football manager. The directors promised a commercial release, and inexperienced as we were, we quickly agreed on a contract. In addition to the Atari ST version, ports to PC, Amiga and C64 were planned.

Under the rather unoriginal name Starbyte Super Soccer, KICKER was released for the Christmas market at the end of 1991, at least for ST and PC, followed by the Amiga version. Enhanced with a new title screen, music and real stadium sounds but otherwise largely unchanged, Starbyte Super Soccer collected a series of very good reviews in the German gaming press.

We were particularly proud of the 80% rating from Heinrich Lenhardt, the godfather of German games journalism, in Powerplay magazine. Starbyte Super Soccer even made it onto the Powerplay top 100 list in their 1991 special issue.

What could have gone wrong? For one, the simultaneously released Bundesliga Manager Professional, in whose long shadow Starbyte Super Soccer clearly stood. Not to mention Anstoss, which appeared a year later. And secondly, the bankruptcy of Starbyte Software shortly after release.

So Dirk did not become rich from SSS in the monetary sense. There were problems with the very first contractually agreed payments. Unfortunately, Starbyte folded shortly after the game’s release in 1992. Or as Dirk’s lawyer put it in legalese: “The GmbH had apparently dissolved silently without legal successor.”

A year later, Starbyte resurfaced in Bochum with a slightly changed name and a new managing director. SSS was re-released and later bundled in various game collections. But by that point we had barely noticed – Dirk had already written off the game and was mentally immersed in university and a new chapter of his life.

KICKER, or Starbyte Super Soccer, nevertheless gave many players a wonderful time and left lasting positive memories. The fantastic article on Videospielgeschichten.de by Denis is the reason this KICKER Memorial Page exists, and why Dirk, after nearly 30 years, even provided a new version with a bugfix for unrecognised mouse clicks, allowing KICKER to be played in emulation without floppy disk swapping.

After more than 30 years, Dirk rediscovered the source code and revised it – approximately 20,000 lines of GFA-Basic.

A persistent bug in the mouse click detection at program start was identified and fixed. The emulated version now works reliably without disk swapping.