Kick Off /

The Kick Off franchise is a series of football simulation computer games which was highly popular in the early 1990s. The series is renowned for its fast-paced action and delicate ball control scheme. Kick Off, the first game of the series, was designed by Dino Dini and released by Anco for the Amiga and the Atari ST in 1989. The game was received well by the games industry at the time and won many awards. Player Manager was released in 1990. The game was the first game ever to combine a management environment (including tactics, league play, transfers, and detailed player attributes) with a football game engine (based on that of Kick Off). Kick Off 2 was released in 1990 as a sequel to Kick Off. The game introduced a number of new features as well as several small, but important, gameplay tweaks, and it quickly became even more popular than its predecessor. Kick Off 2 lent itself particularly well to human vs. human games, and it was likely the first football game ever to give rise to numerous large-scale tournaments. In 1992, Dino Dini left Anco and signed a contract for Virgin Games, who released Goal! in 1993. Anco released several further editions of the Kick Off series until