Since its debut in 1993, EA’s FIFA series has been a huge commercial success. It arguably hit the big leagues when the franchise first hit the 32-bit formats, with the new CD-based technology allowing for greater realism and presentation closer to what footie fans saw, and heard, on their TV screens during a typical Saturday afternoon match. To say it benefited greatly from the transition from 2D to 3D would be an understatement.
So successful is the franchise that upon stepping into any UK charity shop, you can almost guarantee to find a handful of older FIFA games cluttering the shelves. These tend to date back to the PS2 era; from FIFA 2001 onwards, mostly. This was around the time that FIFA had become a household name, and an essential purchase for anyone sports minded.
FIFA games pre-dating the PS2’s arrival are generally a lot more uncommon, partly due to their age but also due to their obscurity. Chances of finding a copy of, let’s say, FIFA 96 on Game Boy in the wild are slim – which was likely only a modest seller due to the handheld’s waning popularity at the time. That still fares well in comparison to FIFA 96 for SEGA’s 32X add-on, arguably one of the most obscure entries in the franchise – save perhaps for the externally developed FIFA 2005 on the much-maligned Gizmondo handheld.
The SEGA 32X version of FIFA 96 is noteworthy. Around a quarter of the games released for the add-on were simply better looking versions of Mega Drive games that took advantage of the add-on’s expanded colour palette and little more. You’d think FIFA 96 would fall into this camp, being a mere annual sporting update releasing on a format labelled as doomed even before it launched, but no. In late 1995, footie fans who’d remained loyal to the 32X were treated to a three-dimensional rendition of football.
The task of developing FIFA 96 for 32X fell to Probe Entertainment, best known for their 16-bit tie-ins based on Alien 3 and Terminator 2, as well as the home conversions of Mortal Kombat and Primal Rage. They went out of their way to use the 32X’s capabilities to create a 3D pitch with a choice of camera angles – including the ability to follow the action like a TV cameraman, zooming and panning. While the goalposts and parts of the stadium are in 3D, it still used rendered 2D sprites for players; having 20+ polygon-heavy players on screen at once may have been too much for the humble 32-bit add-on. The result is a peculiar halfway point between the Mega Drive/SNES versions and the Saturn/PS1 versions; it was closer to the 32-bit iterations in terms of presentation and features but played more like its 16-bit counterparts. Magazine reviews were mostly in the 60-70% range, which seems fair considering the limited AI and the nondescript nature of the player sprites.
With the US release cancelled, it ended up becoming one of two European SEGA 32X exclusives. Arriving so late in the add-on’s life (November 1995; whereas March 1996 saw the final European 32X release in the form of the intoxicatingly rare Primal Rage) this version of FIFA 96 wasn’t a success story for EA. All the effort put into creating the 3D engine was, in the end, for nothing – it certainly didn’t help change the perception of the 32X, coming and going without any real fanfare.
Most FIFA games recycle their engines for a few years onwards, and again, being a standalone entry is another thing that makes this version noteworthy.
The question is, why did Probe go the extra mile in the first place? Two thoughts spring to mind, both based on pure speculation. EA and SEGA had a strong relationship at the time, and with the Mega Drive home to FIFA (at least until the PS1 became the dominant system) it could be the case that SEGA asked EA to go the extra mile and make use of the hardware. A potential system seller, perhaps. The second reason is much more straightforward; the project was simply handed off to Probe, and with no source code of the Mega Drive version available to them, they had no choice but to start from scratch and work with what the 32X was capable of.
While sales data isn’t available, eBay listings suggest that FIFA 96 on 32X may have even been outsold by the equally late SEGA Game Gear version. As the only football game released on the system, and a European exclusive to boot, this is the FIFA most fans forget about…providing they even knew it existed in the first place.
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