Speedball

The Bitmap Brothers brought their magic touch to soccer.

Set in a grim future, it was a Rollerball-inspired game with very few rules.

Hot on the heels of their debut hit – Xenon, Speedball was another huge success on both the Amiga and Atari ST formats.  At this point in time most developers were hedging their bets as the competition between Amiga and Atari heated up and releasing games on both formats.  The ST had poor horizontal scrolling and so The Bitmap Brothers kept the playfield vertically scrolling – which was no bad thing, but did make the game seem quite claustrophobic.  They worked around this potential problem by giving the player the ability to bounce the ball of the walls, which dramatically changed the flow and pace of the game.

Power-up icons appeared at regular intervals as well as money. Power-ups reversed your opponents controls, froze them in place or turned the ball into a bullet. Money could be used to buy armour and strength as well as bribing the officials to give extra time or an extra goal. A great strategy was to pass the ball to the goalie and then hammer them both into the back of the net.

A two-player mode was where the action really hotted up – fast and furious aggro which kept me and my mates going for many long hours.

Production values were high for the time and the Bitmap Brothers Mark Coleman continued the metallic sheen look that he brought to Xenon and that would continue throughout the Bitmaps’ string of hits. David Whittaker composed the music for Speedball and created the spot effects and added another 80′s classic theme to his already bulging repertoire.

Speedball was additionally released on other formats including the Commodore 64, Sega Master System, DOS PC and released on the NES as Klashball.