Pro Evolution Socceroos

FIFA 16 cover star Tim Cahill might tell you otherwise, but Konami’s long-running football sim had the edge over EA’s officially licensed FIFA throughout the PS2 era. Sure, in several iterations of PES (or Pro Evo, as we called it) the entire Dutch national squad were named “Oranges001”, “Oranges002” etc, Ryan Giggs was called Gigsi, and Arsenal were known as The Wengerboys (or something like that) while FIFA got every player and club name correct like the class nerd it was. But it didn’t matter. Pro Evo played a game of football like we’d never seen before. From PES2 in late 2002 through to PES5 in late 2005, there was more Pro Evo played in the HYPER office than any other game.

I can’t recall exactly when or even which version of Pro Evo, but during this time we set ourselves a challenge: we would win the World Cup.

That probably doesn’t sound too hard. No version of Pro Evo forced you to qualify for the World Cup. You just said I’m going to play the World Cup Mode, picked your team, and you were right there in the group stage of the finals. From there you had to win a handful of games to win the World Cup. Easy.

So we tweaked our challenge: we had to win the World Cup on the five-star difficulty setting while playing as Australia.

Now, for those who haven’t played Pro Evo, bear in mind that five stars is as difficult as it gets. Even seasoned players, as we were, would struggle at five stars to overcome the preternaturally aware AI defenders intercepting passes and goalkeepers pulling off freakish saves. And playing as Australia? Well, let’s just say we had managed to invent for ourselves a six star difficulty setting.

We also had to play it together. That meant four players on one team, each one of us as determined to bask in the glory of scoring the decisive goal as we were culpable of neglecting our defensive duties, pulling the side completely out of formation and failing to man mark the opposition striker. It was breathless, exhilarating and utter chaos: four green and gold clad buffoons exhausting their stamina bars at an unprecedented rate as they all galloped after the same ball in a sight typically reserved for your local under-7s team on a Saturday morning now transported to the world stage.

Australia by this point had only ever qualified once for the World Cup finals, way back in 1974. But here we were, the Socceroos mixing it with the best from Brazil, Germany, England and Italy. We pulled off some stunning upsets (a 3-0 win over the then World Cup holders France was one to tell the grandkids) and some absolutely shambolic defeats, including a 2-1 reverse against Costa Rica. But we never won the World Cup. Our best result was a brave loss to Argentina (I forget the score) in the semi-finals.

Let’s see if Tim Cahill can do any better in 2018.

This article was first published in HYPER.