Kick Off

Kick Off is a soccer simulation computer game series designed by Dino Dini and released by Anco for various home computer platforms in 1989. The game was received well by the games industry at the time and won many awards. There have been numerous sequels and ports to many home computer and game consoles. After Kick Off 2 Dino Dini signed a contract for Virgin Games and later games in the Kick Off series are developed by Steve Screech.

Anco published the first versions of Kick Off for the Amiga and Atari ST and it was immediately considered a pioneer of soccer computer games, thanks to the new original features never included in a football game before.

With Kick Off, contrary to all its predecessors, the ball did not stick to the player's feet, but instead was realistically kicked ahead from the players. This added an important degree of difficulty and skill requirement at the same time. This, along with all the new original features like action replays, players with different characteristics, different tactics, fouls, yellow cards, red cards, injuries, injury time and various referees with different moods, made Kick Off and especially its successor, Kick Off 2, one of the most successful football game series ever. Kick Off enthusiasts still play tournaments on original Amiga computers every year.

Even though versions for other computers followed, the Atari ST and especially the Amiga versions were by far the most popular. Kick Off was first developed for the Atari ST and then ported to the Amiga

Source: Wikipedia, "Kick Off", available under the CC-BY-SA License.