Cyberball

About Cyberball

Cyberball (1988) is Atari Games' seven-a-side robot football game set in 2022, played with an explosive ball instead of downs, whose four-player dual-monitor cabinet sparked tournaments across the United States.

Cyberball in Depth

Robots of different speeds, sizes and skills play a seven-man version of American football. Instead of downs, the ball heats up from "cool" to "warm", "hot" and "critical" as it is used, and can only be reset by crossing the 50-yard line or by a change of possession; a robot tackled with a critical ball is destroyed along with it. Robots also wear down as they are tackled, smoking and then catching fire, and a burning robot explodes when hit, fumbling the ball. Prize money buys faster, tougher units. On offence, players choose run, pass or option and then one of four plays; on defence, short, medium or long coverage and then a scheme.

The cabinet has two monitors, each with two sets of controls, allowing one player, two in co-op, or up to four head-to-head. Four-player games opened up new tactics: because several plays begin from identical formations, human receivers could run one route while pretending to run another, forcing defenders to read the play and race to the likely passing spot, often using their once-per-play turbo boost. That room to improvise built its popularity and led to tournaments across the US.

Making Cyberball

Atari Games developed and published Cyberball for arcades in 1988, and it was ported to the Sega Genesis, Atari ST, Amiga, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and NES. The NES version was less well received than the arcade original: GamePro faulted its poor controls, missing features such as player upgrades and "archaic" graphics, and VideoGames & Computer Entertainment's Chris Bieniek held it up as a definitive example of the NES's limits, while Allgame's Skyler Miller wrote that it ended up "feeling more like a primitive version of football than a futuristic one". MegaTech called the Genesis version a decent conversion with good graphics. In a retrospective, Allgame's Brett Alan Weiss called the arcade game "a highly influential futuristic sports game" with fast, hard-hitting action, finding it erratic but "undeniable fun for arcade-style sports enthusiasts".