FA Cup Football

FA Cup Football is a football title for the ZX Spectrum from 1986. As the name says, its subject is the world's oldest cup competition – the English FA Cup with its knockout format, where small clubs can face giants and a single match decides who goes through.

Football was the most rewarding sports theme on British 8-bit computers, and developers approached it from two directions: either as an action game with players running about the pitch, or as management and strategy titles where a team's fate is decided by choices off the turf. The cup format, with its drama of draws, upsets and progressing rounds, was a favourite frame for the second approach.

The year 1986 falls within the Spectrum's peak period, when sports titles filled the sales charts and dozens of football games appeared every year. Amid that competition, FA Cup Football leaned on the strength of the competition's own name, familiar to every British player from Saturday television.

Today it stands as an example of the genre in its early, text-and-menu-driven form – and thanks to emulation it can be experienced exactly as it looked on a cassette in the eighties.

The charm of the cup format is that it cannot be planned for: the draw may send your team to a favourite's ground, and a single mistake ends the run. Football titles of the period mined that for a tension league tables could not offer – every match here is a final.

This is one of the playable cards: FA Cup Football boots straight into your browser window on OldGame.cz – one click on start is all it takes.