In all my travels, what I perhaps miss most is Tehkan World Cup and a group of fine players with whom I can test my skill.
There may be only fifty people in the world who still hold the game of Tehkan World Cup in high regard. Perhaps there are more, but it is hard to say now. In 1986 my local arcade bought two machines to cope with demand; there was always a line of people waiting to play it except at the quietest times. On Saturday afternoons, you were lucky to get a game at all. Perhaps for that reason, I cycled four miles in rain on a Sunday evening with a pocketful of coins in order to get my fix. At the beginning of my Tehkan World Cup odyssey I was slightly underage for my local establishment on account of their strange obsession with running gambling machines, resulting in many a battle of wits with staff. Usually I could sneak in for a couple of games before they noticed my presence, but once they did, it was usually game over. If they were very kind they would let me finish my game first.
Tehkan World Cup, to a compelling extent, crossed the boundary between computer game and sport when two people played head to head. Forget the single player games against a simple-minded computer AI. That said, with the dexterity and tactical awareness a new player must develop, it must have taken me a year to progress all the way to the final and win my first World Cup. I still remember the day I did it: 1-0 against Team 7 and I was World Champion at last. I learned to score by crossing the ball from a fellow player called Mark. "The other way" of scoring in that day was to run diagonally from the edge of the box and aim for the far post. For all the interest surrounding its early days as the star of the arcade, no one knew what TWC really was, for little did they fathom there were more than two ways to score a goal.
Recently someone demonstrated mathematically that TWC had millions of ways to score. Perhaps in all my years of playing I have learned fifty scoring moves and forgotten a few more. When you played a comparable human opponent, it became a test of mental agility and psychological domination. As with the best games we know, be they tennis or chess, the unspoken battle of nerve and steel was thick in the air. When you played an opponent of subordinate skill, it was an opportunity to toy with his ambition and his ego, to lull him into false security, then sit back and watch as you take it away. After that, you usually never saw them again. Consequently it was more prudent to keep your victories narrow, and leave them with enough pride left to desire a rematch.
It took a couple of years to become a top player, but most would jump off the learning curve after they found they could beat the easy computer teams. The result was that most people ended up at a relatively low plateau of skill that posed small challenge to the masters of the game. To keep things interesting, one could opt not to punish an opponent for the more obvious holes in his defense, and set about scoring those goals with the highest tariff and wow factor. If the opponent began to display conceit in his artificial success, it was a simple matter to engage top gear and re-establish who was the true black belt.
I remember well the players with whom I tested my true skills. Peter, you had genius; the golden hands. Because of you, I could never be the best. I even beat you a couple of times, but it meant a lot when you asked me my record score. George, we marched all across town to find a working machine to play on. That was devotion! I smile when I remember the way you chipped my advancing goalkeeper. Never have I seen that goal again. Alan, your presence on the quiet days saved me from the monotony of the single player game. You discovered a weakness in my goalkeeping one time, but I forgive you now. Kwong, your goal celebrations haunt me today because I had the finesse and you had mastered the means to attrition. I longed for your arm to tire or your players to suffer heart attacks from the merciless way you made them run. Mark, you were the early pioneer, to whom I owe my first World Cup victory. I defeated you one day as Luke Skywalker to Darth Vader, the son that overcame his father. There were others, but their names have faded through a decade and more of disuse. All of them I may never see again. It was the best of times at the Enterprize amusements, latterly boarded up and probably now a shopping mall. I will buy my own Tehkan World Cup some day, I pray for a sum I can afford, but you were the priceless ones. We were weekend gladiators, the Saturday Crowd, grandmasters and untouchable in our game. No one was our equal. I remember owning the arena briefly, when just once it was you who looked up to me. In all my travels around the world, these are the victories and defeats I have treasured the most.
When the crowds faded, I consoled myself by taking apart the feeble computer opponents. My arm would get sore in scoring 20 goals in a single game, so I passed the time by challenging myself to score increasingly difficult goals, a perentage of which you can find on this site. I thought it would be entertaining to develop a passing game like Brazil, a style I was then able to use against the occasional human player that passed my way. Gradually all the World Cups in the arcades in my town began to disappear, and the ones that were left became less and less reliable. Before I even noticed, TWC was gone. That was in the days when it was unheard of to purchase your own acrade machine, and my chance was gone. I am still looking to buy my own Tehkan World Cup. I know they must still exist somewhere in various states of repair, and my inextricable search through every arcade I come across continues.
I still often play TWC on my PC through the MAME emulator. Some of my best scores are recorded here. The mouse is a capable substitute for trackball, not as fast but with a lighter, more nimble change of direction. I would like to build my own trackball unit comparable to those found on the original acrade TWC machines, for then I will have truly come home.
I hope this site finds TWC some new players and can serve as a memento and a hitching-post for those former veterans who have thought to perform a Google search for their favourite old game. Maybe one day there will be a sequel to TWC with the same playability but with better graphics and the more obvious glitches taken care of, but no such thing is on the horizon. Before the advent of MAME, however, it did not seem even possible that we might see the sights and sounds of Tehkan World Cup again. Fortunate are we. Early designs exist for a utility that may one day allow MAME players the ability to compete against each other across the Internet. There exists therefore the tantalising prospect that TWC may come into its own once more as a head-to-head arena of the most captivating kind.
Michael Aidulis,
California, USA
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