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The shot flies high and straight, arcing towards the overhead camera as the players below jostle for position. Nobody is close enough to intercept. The last line of defence is the keeper, and he's right there, in the narrow mouth of the goal, too smart to stray off his line. He takes it easily. A split-second later, the opposition forward slams into him, taking the ball out of his limp hands, finishing the play. The scoreboard shows ten - and then an instant later, another ten. The keeper, it turns out, is still on the floor, waiting for the medical droids that will come and scoop him off the field of play. His legs twitch, briefly. Somewhere in the stands, a voice calls out, almost too faint to hear. 'Ice cream?' NBA Jam may pale before the 2K series, Madden improves almost every year, and even the mighty Sensible Soccer looks limited next to modern-day Pro Evo, but in the future-sports genre there's still barely a game fit to polish Speedball 2's shiny metal boots. Alone among the 90s sports games, it's never really been outclassed in its own field, even by its own creators. Speedball 2 HD, the version currently selling on Steam, is essentially a remake with a few more colours and league options - no 3D, no real-time pitch deformation, no microtransations to buy better helmets or spiky balls. Speedball 2, almost alone among games, seems to have defied the ageing process.
One thing that helps, of course, is that Speedball isn't a real game, and so everything's designed to fit the limitations of the top-down, 2D format. Things were nearly very different, and much more boring. "The first Speedball was an interesting story," says Mike Montogomery, lead Bitmap Brother and designer on the game. "We'd just finished Xenon on the Master System for Mastertronic, and they said 'Look, we've got this idea about doing a game based on real tennis.'" That would be the forebear of modern tennis, played on indoor courts where you can bounce the balls off the walls. The one that nobody plays.
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