Holy Grail Football Arcade Games Part 1 - Mexico 86

Europe's The Final Countdown was number 1 in the charts (I think, it was my number 1 anyway) and Negrete had scored an absolutely unreal bicycle kick for Mexico at the Mexico 86 World Cup, a tournament that was already blowing minds before Diego Maradona took a great Belgium team and a decent England team apart single handed on his way to inevitably lifting the greatest football prize of them all.

1986 was also the year, although I didn't know it yet, that my favourite horror film Trick or Treat, the Citizen Kane of heavy metal horror films, would be released. I was 10 years old, spending my days watching the greatest ever year of the greatest football tournament on earth and my nights pondering how I was going to build this life size Jabba the Hutt thing. I had diagrams and some green balloons. It was a start.

Mexico 86. Football arcade gaming's Hand of God...

Back in the 80s every arcade, large or small, would have at least one football game. Typically they were either a Super Sidekicks, a Football Champ, a Mexico 86 or a Tehkan World Cup, in my experience at least. And where we're blessed today with original cabinets lovingly restored by the people running the barcades, back in the day you almost never saw original cabinets. In fact almost every game was lumped into a generic arcade cabinet and you were lucky if the buttons were even configured right! The taxi depots, chippys, leisure centres and corner shops where we played these games weren't exactly fussed on the originality of these things and were highly unlikely to put the money into any level of authenticity.

In fact if the internet had never been invented I likely wouldn't know that Mexico 86 is a four player game and that Tehkan World Cup (my other football game holy grail) originally came in a cocktail style cabinet and was controlled by trackballs. However having acquired this knowledge I set about, probably 20 years ago, to try to track them down. We're all just teenagers with adult income after all right?

A couple of years in and with not a sniff of either game for sale I had a go at creating a Mexico 86 cabinet myself, piecing together what little was available online 18 years ago to try to get a picture of the overall finished project. Lo and behold this is how I discovered that not only was Mexico 86 a four player game but that the kick buttons were huge pedals at the bottom of the cab. Pure madness! That put paid to my recreation plans, shelved forever.

I did find out though that Mexico 86 was an unofficial cabinet, a bootleg of a game called Kick And Run. It seems that the Italian factories that were producing Kick And Run cabinets were knocking a Mexico 86 bootleg out the back door to cash in on the popularity of the Mexico 86 World Cup. This is unsubstantiated but is repeated enough for it to have become arcade folklore.

In 2023 we got a video from an Italian seller of arcade cabs and there it was, lurking far off in the background, the holy grail. A four player Mexico 86 cabinet replete with kick pedals the lot. A couple of weeks later and, I rub my eyes still, it was here in Belfast.

Of course with nearly 40-year-old cabinets nothing really goes that smoothly and in this case the bootleg Mexico 86 game board didn't have a kick for the fourth player. So began the long road of figuring out how to get the game going in all of its four player glory.

We tried multiple bootleg boards but they all suffered from the same lack of a 4th player kick. We tried multiple MAME roms and even roms from a Japanese arcade system in the search for player 4. Eventually we found a MAME combination where someone, somewhere, had the fourth player perfectly emulated and we're in the midst of hooking this up.

The game itself is brilliant, the animation and sprites are peerless, the movement and mechanics a dream and the difficulty is spot on however I'm basing all of that on playing it for years as a two player game in the arcade with joysticks and buttons only. Will shooting with the pedals make it a bit harder to play? What will two player co-op VS two player co-op be like? Thankfully we'll know soon and I couldn't be more excited.

Next up, Part 2 - trackballs and stressballs with Tehkan World Cup!