Sometime in 2001, I found a copy of FIFA 2000 for the Game Boy Color. It was the only box and it was £20 which was a steal back then. I’d played the PlayStation 1 version loads of times at my friends house so I wanted to replicate the experience in handheld form. But I needed to ask my mum if I could get it and she wasn’t nearby so I had to leave the box on the shelf. I found her, she said yes, and I returned to pick up my coveted game. Except it wasn’t there anymore. Someone else had picked it up. I was furious and my mum caught mumbling some choice words under my breath which I fortunately escaped punishment for. It wasn’t her fault and I couldn’t have just picked the box up and walked around with it (this was in a department store where and the game shop—GAME in this case—was a section of the floor I was on so by leaving with the box, it would have looked like I was stealing).
My dreams of playing a football game on my GBC were in tatters (I had Soccer for the original Game Boy but I wanted a game exclusive to the GBC). Until I found a different game in a different game shop (RIP Electronics Boutique) and it had one of my favourite footballers on the cover.
Ronaldo V-Football was released for the PS1 and GBC in 2000. Developed by PAM Development (now part of 2K Games) and published by Infogrames, it was the only football game endorsed by Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima during the peak of his illustrious career. I can’t remember how much it cost but I knew how unique it was because nobody at school had it.
When you start the game, you’re greeted with credits, followed by a short animation of an 8-bit Ronaldo running with the ball and scoring a goal and then some decent pixel art of O Fenômeno on the title screen. There are 6 options to choose from:
- Friendly Match
- Ronaldo Cups
- Cup
- League
- Practice
- Options
While I loved playing the matches between clubs and international teams, my all-time favourite section was the Options screen because that’s where you could edit team names. Because Ronaldo V-Football didn’t have the rights to use any club names or competitions, they had to use place names. Aston Villa became Aston, AC Milan became Milano, and Ajax became Amsterdam. If you were Barcelona or Chelsea fan, you were sorted.
I spent hours changing the names of teams because I wanted my experience to be as accurate as possible and it meant I got to look up different teams and learn a bit more about them. Internet access was scarce for me so when I couldn’t reach a computer, I looked at my various encyclopedias and football fact books for hints.
What I didn’t realise was that this was a major part of my neurodivergent journey as a child, before I knew what any of that meant. It was a special interest and a hyperfixation all rolled into one. I loved football as a child. The shirts, the sponsors, the teams, the players, their career histories. I often got my friend Rikesh to ask me trivia questions in the playground and, to my knowledge, I got them right. I soaked up as much knowledge as I could and loved the sport as much for the activity as the fascinating historical data behind it. I never got it at the time—because ideas of autism and ADHD were very backwards—but these neurodivergent interactions enhanced gameplay. I suddenly felt invested in the games I was playing via a feedback loop of knowledge and wanting to beat teams that weren’t Manchester United (the team I supported).
This customisation wasn’t exclusive to Ronaldo V-Football, of course. The Pro Evolution Soccer series (RIP) had a similar licensing issue so they had to resort to funny alternative names like Aragon, Trad Bricks, and Man Red for Manchester United and London FC for Chelsea but you could change them. Alas, I didn’t have a PS1 at the time and didn’t have the money to buy Pro Evo or any FIFA titles beyond 2000 when it was on sale. So it was just me and Ronaldo, getting the names and the cups just right before starting a new match or tournament.
One of the first games I got when I bought my RG40XX V was Ronaldo V-Football as a way to test the GBC emulator and get a nostalgia hit. Besides the form factor and 20+ years of growth and grey hair, it felt just the same (the LCD shader also helped). And of course I went back into the Options screen and looked around at the teams. Athens was still there; so was Amsterdam, Aston, and Manchester. But I knew what they really were and I had all the books and carefully stored memories to prove it.
