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A keen-eyed observer might have noticed a few new icons pop up in their PES 2016 menu a few weeks back. The game's latest patch, weighing in at a hefty 3.9GB, brought with it a raft of Euro 2016 content - but Konami's been pretty quiet about the release. It's hard to imagine a more underwhelming launch for the official licensed game of an international football tournament. It wasn't always this way. World Cup and European Championship tie-ins have typically been major events for publishers and gamers alike. Sitting as they do slightly outside the major franchises' Christmas-focused release calendar, they've offered both the chance for developers to indulge in a little non-iterative experimentation, and for gamers to soak up a simulation of unique contemporaneity - an experience specifically designed to be played for one month, and one month only.
EA's 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa, for example, managed both to capture the atmosphere of the tournament and represent a FIFA 2010.5 in the improvements it made to the match engine. Many critics even preferred it to its full sequel, FIFA 2011. A decade earlier, the same publisher made the most of post-Euro '96 football fever with two complementary World Cup '98 releases. The first, FIFA: Road to the World Cup 98, is one of the most fondly remembered football games of all time, featuring as it does that famous Blur 'Song 2' intro, the bizarre option of indoor football, and a World Cup qualification mode of unprecedented depth.
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