PES Games – A Story of Pro Evolution Soccer Part 1
Pro Evolution Soccer is a soccer (football) video game with legions of fans around the world. PES games are produced for all major consoles including PS3, XBOX 360, Wii, and PC, and are distributed across five continents, making it a global powerhouse.
Pro Evolution Soccer games have been around since 1996 when Goal Storm, whose single title was the start of Konami’s franchise. Along with the FIFA series from Electronic Arts (EA), the two games have been going head-to-head with and dominating the soccer video game scene for all this time. PES games have always focused on gameplay and resemblance to real football, while FIFA has efficiently focused on being ‘official’, sacrificing gameplay for licenses and an arcade style of play.
The franchise has undergone several name changes in Europe and North America, at the moment the games are called PES followed by the next year until the year of release, so the last installment of this year released in October will be called PES 2013.
The initial name of Goal Storm remained for only one year, before being changed to ISS Pro in 1997. It then changed to ISS Pro 98 followed by ISS Pro Evolution in May 1999, this being the first time ‘Evolution’ appeared on the qualification. At this point in the game’s history, updates were not released at regular intervals and I was first introduced to the game in 2001 with the arrival of ISS Pro Evolution 2.
Unlike in Europe and North America, in Japan, home of Konami, Pro Evo has retained the ‘Winning Eleven’ moniker since its inception, with the ‘World Soccer’ prefix added after the first few years.
What made Pro Evo different from other soccer games was the way it was played. The view of the action was from the side and the ball could be kicked in any direction, unlike FIFA games where any directional shot would always fly towards the goal, making the game look like a montage.
Earlier games that stayed true to soccer, like Sensible Soccer, had top-down views, which meant you played running up or down the TV/monitor screen. Graphics were limited in the 1990s, but FIFA and Pro Evo began to change all this, taking their respective games in different gameplay-wise directions.
From the beginning, Pro Evolution Soccer never had naming rights to players or teams, so an in-game editing option was created early in the franchise. This allowed expert players to edit the players and teams, replacing fake names with real names. I remember spending hours recreating football strips and renaming all the players, until the PES fan forums started a trend towards option files and max units.
These save option files were created by groups of fans and then uploaded across the internet to forum pages and download sites, so that all fans could quickly save and rename all players in the game. They now had better players, kits and real names, but it still didn’t compare to the official FIFA licenses, but it didn’t have to, players just wanted a resemblance as it’s always been the game that brings it back. fans year after year to Pro Evo.
This game was perfected over the following years when ISS Pro Evolution 2 became Pro Evolution Soccer in 2001. The game was modified all the time with AI (artificial intelligence) which made the game more intelligent and the game speeds changed regularly. , sometimes accelerating and accelerating. then slowing down for the next pitch, as Konami tried to find her footing. Tackling became more of an art, rather than just smashing buttons, and training modes were introduced to allow players to practice before doing things in real games.
Discussion on the PES forums alluded to FIFA getting literally mad at Konami over licensing issues, forcing Konami to further obscure fake team names (Manchester United was no longer ‘Man Red’, now was ‘Aragon!’). This provided new challenges for the publishing masters and fans always expected Konami to fight over the licenses for the next game; to date, this has yet to happen considering PES 2013.
In Pro Evolution Soccer 2, commentators Peter Brackley (voice of Football Italia on Channel 4) and Trevor Brooking were brought in to add a new dimension to realism betting. Hearing someone famous talk about your team during gameplay at first sounded exciting, but limitations in technology meant that this could quickly become boring, monotonous and often irrelevant.
By comparison, the music was pushed into the menu screen, with Queen belting out ‘We Will Rock you’ and ‘We Are The Champions’, amongst other artists and tracks. The music in the menus was a welcome addition, as you could very often spend long periods of time negotiating these pages, especially if you were editing. This has been a characteristic of Konami that they have maintained and improved upon over the years, up to the present, often using small, unknown, or unknown groups and giving them a platform to reach people through their music.
In the second part of PES games we will look at the ongoing battle with FIFA, the move towards online and high definition gaming and how PES hopes to reclaim its soccer video game crown with PES 2013.