A very short entry for an unknown Football game that was possibly in development or to be developed by Mike Lyons. Basically, we found a set of sprites on a utilities disk, which Mike isn’t very sure about their origins. He certainly doesn’t recall ever working on a football game.
They could be from the time he was working at Maelstrom, Active Minds or even briefly Denton Designs. I did wonder if they were anything to do with the World Class Rugby game that Denton had done, but they don’t quite match up, but they are close.
Thanks to Joshua Dove in the comments, he found an entry from Martin Smith (long time contributor to GTW) on Mobygames that suggests that during the development of World Class Rugby by Audiogenic as Sports Action Rugby, Denton Designs were planning on using the same engine to make an American Football game, but it never happened.
It could suggest that perhaps Mike had been tasked originally with doing the game engine, but after leaving – it was handed to Roy Bannon to do instead. It might explain why the sprites are quite similar and have an American Football look to them.
If anyone knows more, please get in touch. For now we’ve added the title as an alternate name, but with a question mark for the time being.
Contributions: Mike Lyons
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Assets_Footygame (zip)
Gallery
Update history
17/08/25 – Details from Joshua Dove and Martin Smith added about a possible link for the game.
There’s a note at MobyGames (unsourced) that reads “Sports Action American Football
During the game’s development as Sports Action Rugby, Dentons were planning on using the same game engine to make an (American) Football game, but this never happened.”
https://www.mobygames.com/game/453/world-class-rugby/trivia/
Maybe these sprites are from work on that?
Hi Joshua – ah that is very interesting, and could be something for sure. Though if they were using the same engine, then it would have been using Roy Bannon’s work – but then maybe Mike got hold of the sprites for some reason. Perhaps he originally had been asked to take a look at developing the original game engine and was given some sprites to play with. Sadly he can’t recall anything about them – so it may have been very brief, as he was only there for a very short space of time.