Speedball was a kind of futuristic hand-ball, with the dangerous body-checking of ice-hockey and the off-the-wall unpredictability of squash. Its real world sports heritage was also in air-hockey and table football. The idea of a future sport like Speedball had occasionally been visualized in feature films like Disney's 'The Black Hole' (1979) and Tron (1982), and they were clearly an influence.
In terms of Speedball's video game roots, similarities with simple bat-and-ball type games like Taito's Arkanoid (1986) were apparent in the fact that it was principally a ball bouncing off the sides of the screen and collecting power-ups from rotating tiles.
In Speedball, the ball gradually came to a halt under the effect of gravity and of course there were teams and goals. Speedball inevitably owed a debt to top-down perspective soccer games. In Speedball, the teams had different abilities and the league system was finely balanced and challenging, making it fun to try and win.
The original Speedball game seemed absolutely amazing at the time it was released in 1988, and even now it still looks pretty good thanks to the grungy sci-fi graphics. The steel tiled arena in which the sport took place is reminiscent of the ubiquitous Microsoft Minesweeper game. The metallic theme pervaded the whole game. The style of Speedball influenced later Bitmap Brothers' games, not least Speedball 2. The cache earned from Speedball guaranteed the Bitmaps future success.
The
revolutionary aspects of Speedball that made it better than other sports-simulators were its ultra-cool futuristic visuals, rocking music, and frenetic game-play. Tackling was the most critical way of stopping the opposing team from scoring a goal once they had the ball. Because of the need to tackle regularly, the players wore heavy armor - like in American football, which was a short-lived fad in Europe at the time. The armor meant that the level of brutality required to wrest the ball away was increased. This brutality was quite shocking to kids in 1988, since the ability to make life-like looking characters credibly pummel each other on screen was difficult to achieve back then.
This game set out to make player clashes look and sound painful. Speedball actually seemed to cross a line in the shameless nature of the shoulder charging rough-and-tumble in a way that even boxing and wrestling games could not. I can only guess this was because it seemed more exciting to our sci-fi saturated imaginations, and because the game-play was so good that losing the ball seemed a big deal.
