International Rugby Simulator

Codemasters was founded in 1986 and within two years dominated the British budget software market. The model was direct: games at £1.99, simple premises, fast development, enormous print runs. Sports simulators made up a substantial slice of that output, and International Rugby Simulator, from 1988, belongs to it.

Rugby was a demanding subject for an eight-bit game. Unlike football, which can be reduced to moving a ball around a pitch, rugby involves scrums, line-outs, passes that may only go backwards, and scoring in several forms. Converting that to a Spectrum controlled by a keyboard or a single joystick button meant simplifying or automating most of the rules and leaving the player only decisions expressible as a direction plus one button.

The ZX Spectrum also had no hardware support for sprites or scrolling, so sports games on it either displayed the whole pitch at once at a small scale or scrolled a window in software at considerable cost in performance. Both approaches have drawbacks, and period sports titles handled the trade-off in different ways.

The credits list Ian Dunlop and Neil Adamson — two names rather than a studio, which is characteristic of the British eighties, where games were routinely written by individuals or pairs contracted by a publisher.

On OldGame.cz, International Rugby Simulator runs directly in the browser. A few minutes will show you how much of rugby fitted into an eight-bit game — and, more instructively, how much did not.