''Italy 1990'' (also known as ''World Class Soccer'' in the United States and ''Italia 1990'' in most of Europe) is a

soccer Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players who primarily use their feet to propel the ball around a rectangular field called a pitch. The objective of the game is ...

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...

published by

U.S. Gold U.S. Gold Limited was a British video game publisher based in Witton, Birmingham, England. The company was founded in 1984 by Anne and Geoff Brown in parallel to their distributor firm, CentreSoft, both of which became part of Woodward Brown Ho ...

and programmed by

Tiertex Design Studios Tiertex Design Studios Limited was a British software development company and former video game developer based in Macclesfield, England; it was founded in 1986, focusing on porting games to home computers and handheld platforms. As a video ga ...

in 1990. It features the

1990 FIFA World Cup The 1990 FIFA World Cup was the 14th FIFA World Cup, a quadrennial football tournament for men's senior national teams. It was held from 8 June to 8 July 1990 in Italy, the second country to host the event for a second time (the first being Me ...

held in

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

but is not part of the official ''FIFA World Cup'' series. For the American market it was branded as ''World Class Soccer''. In Europe (except the U.K.) it was released as ''Italia 1990'' by U.S. Gold in association with Erbe Software. It was released for

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

Amstrad CPC The Amstrad CPC (short for ''Colour Personal Computer'') is a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad between 1984 and 1990. It was designed to compete in the mid-1980s home computer market dominated by the Commodore 64 and the Sin ...

Atari ST The Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985 and was widely available in July. It was the first pers ...

Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness ...

ZX Spectrum The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer. Referred to during development as t ...

and

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

. U.S. Gold had released the official game of the previous World Cup in 1986 (''

World Cup Carnival ''World Cup Carnival'' is a 1986 sports video game developed by Artic Computing and published by U.S. Gold for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum; it is the first licensed FIFA World Cup, World Cup video game and is based on the 1986 ...

'') which was extremely badly received, and would go on to release '' World Cup USA '94'' as the official game of the 1994 World Cup. The official 1990 World Cup licence was acquired by

Virgin Mastertronic Virgin Interactive Entertainment (later renamed Avalon Interactive) was the video game publishing division of British conglomerate the Virgin Group. It developed and published games for major platforms and employed developers, including Westwoo ...

who produced two titles, '' World Cup Soccer: Italia '90'' for home computers and '' World Cup Italia '90'' for

Sega is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational video game and entertainment company headquartered in Shinagawa, Tokyo. Its international branches, Sega of America and Sega Europe, are headquartered in Irvine, California and London, r ...

consoles.

Reception

Computer Gaming World ''Computer Gaming World'' (CGW) was an American computer game magazine published between 1981 and 2006. One of the few magazines of the era to survive the video game crash of 1983, it was sold to Ziff Davis in 1993. It expanded greatly through ...

'' criticised the game for only displaying about 10% of the field at a time without a "radar" screen to show the rest, but liked the animation. The magazine concluded that "''World Class Soccer'' should prove an informative and reasonably entertaining way to prepare for the event".

References

External links

*
Review and screenshots
in Spanish (archived)

Game
at GiantBomb 1990 video games Association football video games Amiga games Amstrad CPC games Atari ST games Commodore 64 games DOS games ZX Spectrum games Tiertex Design Studios games FIFA World Cup video games 1990 FIFA World Cup Video games developed in the United Kingdom U.S. Gold games {{footy-videogame-stub

Reception

See also

References

External links