Pleroma

Pleroma

Richard Moss MossRC
This cover conjures images (for me) of a football game played along a city block, dodging bystanders and traffic, bouncing the ball off lamp-posts and shop windows, rolling it under parked cars.

Unfortunately the game itself is just a standard outdoor riff on indoor soccer, presumably based on the Puma Street Soccer Cup that ran for a while in the 90s (and beyond?).
Front cover for the PC version of Puma Street Soccer, showing two players in full kit battling for control of the ball while they apparently rush past some sort of old wall lined by lampposts.

Damiano Gerli damianogerli@mastodon.social

@MossRC this was actually developed by Italian software house Pixelstorm, right after acquired by Trecision in order to work on a 3D football game to sell to Microsoft.

But half of the studio refused to be acquired (and move away from Naples), so that in the end, Trecision realized the developers responsible for the 3D engine had left and, well, they mentioned it to me as "a mistake".

Richard Moss MossRC
@damianogerli Interesting! I haven't played it yet, but I was reading about it earlier and wondered about the story behind it. Seemed like a neat counterplay to the trends of the time that struggled to get air against the dozens of other football games coming out at the time. It got glowing reviews in a Portuguese magazine and a Dutch magazine.
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Damiano Gerli damianogerli@mastodon.social

@MossRC I wrote about Trecision and the Pixelstorm acquisition a bit here https://genesistemple.com/the-history-of-trecision-part-iii-big-money-small-hopes I also spoke with the former Pixelstorm leader but, frankly, I don't feel brave enough to publish even half of what he told me... :D

Richard Moss MossRC
@damianogerli Any word on how Puma Street Soccer sold? I saw mention in there that they made money from selling the engine to Ubi, but nothing on how it fared commercially. (Also, I'm semi-familiar with Football Generation; I had no idea its origins lie in a cancelled Zidane licensed game.)

Damiano Gerli damianogerli@mastodon.social

@MossRC apparently it sold okay, even though the developers never saw most of the money on that as they made quite a limited economic agreement. But don't quote me on that, as this is all information I got from one interview from the former Pixelstorm so not much verification on that.

Richard Moss MossRC
@damianogerli Cool. Thanks! As I'm sure you've guessed, I'm working on a thing and this is all relevant.