NASL Soccer is dated 1979 and credited to APh Technological Consulting, and that credit is worth unpacking. APh was an outside engineering firm that wrote software for Mattel's console around the turn of the 1980s. Our record files the game under the Atari 2600, so the entry may reflect a later conversion or a platform field that does not match the title's origin.

The NASL abbreviation points at the North American Soccer League, which enjoyed a short-lived boom in the United States at the end of the 1970s. Sports games of that period used a licence mostly in the name; the football itself was reduced to a handful of player figures, a ball and two goals.

By modern standards 1979 is prehistory. Consoles of that generation worked with a few kilobytes, athletes were single-colour blocks, and legibility of movement mattered far more than detail. The side-on viewpoint recorded here was the standard answer for sports titles of the era, because it simplified both drawing and on-screen orientation.

The database lists no rules, no squad size and no match length, so none appear in this text. The valuable part of the record is the date itself: football games existed on home consoles almost from the start, long before they turned into annual licensed franchises.

This entry on OldGame.cz supplies the year, the developer credit and whatever screenshots survive; a browser-playable build is not part of it.