"Finally, a game where the referee doesn't rule out my goals"

EA Sports releases a new game under a new name this month, following the end of a 30-year partnership with FIFA. From Sol Campbell to Avril Lavigne and a Polish MMA fighter, it's an era that'll live long in the memory

- By Chris Evans

Thirty years on, Tom Stone remembers the conversations at EA Sports ahead of them launching the very first edition of FIFA. It’s hard to believe today that there was ever any doubt the world’s most renowned video game organisation would make a success out of football. Back in 1993, though, before the birth of the Xbox or PlayStation, there was plenty of cynicism among EA’s top brass.

“The Americans just didn’t get it,” reveals Stone, who was appointed as the company’s vice-president of European marketing that year. “They were like, ‘Soccer? What is that?’ They asked how many units this game was going to sell; they said football wasn’t very popular. We countered, ‘Actually, it really is’.”

In the end, even EA’s European division, who had argued the case for the creation of a football game, couldn’t have foreseen how colossal their idea would become.

As much as Stone and his colleagues were consciously seeking an “evergreen franchise” that would deliver big returns each year, just as Madden NFL was doing in North America, what followed was nothing short of a global sensation. After the game’s maiden iteration, FIFA International Soccer, released on Sega Mega Drive in December 1993, the series sold in excess of 330 million copies and became the best-selling sports video game franchise of all time.

And it nearly didn’t see the light of day.