World Rugby

Rugby was a recurring subject in British eight-bit software, even if it never approached the popularity of football. World Rugby, from 1993, is a late Commodore 64 title, released when the platform already had a decade behind it and most publishers had shifted their attention to sixteen-bit machines.

Sports games on the C64 generally split between those chasing action and those chasing tactics. Rugby is inherently more complicated than football, since it revolves around territorial gain, scrums and passing backwards, and a game has to translate all that into two joystick axes and one button. The usual solution was to give you control of the player holding the ball while the rest of the team repositions automatically, making the timing of a pass before contact the decisive skill.

The side-on view the game uses makes sense for reading progress up the pitch. The Commodore 64 handled smooth scrolling and enough sprites to keep a cluster of players legible on screen, if not an entire team at once. The SID chip added the audio character that set this platform apart from its rivals.

What gives such a title value today is how it handled rules that are anything but self-evident. Players who know rugby will appreciate what the developers managed to preserve. Players who do not will need a moment to work out why the ball cannot be thrown forward. On OldGame.cz you can play it directly in the browser, and screenshots are on file as well.