Description
The original future sport game, Speedball is played out on a small court with five players on each team, making it more frantic than the more famous sequel. The ball must be thrown into the goal at your opponent's end. Any amount of physical contact can be made, and there are no illegal ways to get the ball or the goal.

Before each match you can bribe the referee into awarding you a head-start or strengthening the abilities of your players. You compete in a simple knockout cup tournament, or in individual 2-player games.

C64 version
The C64 version of the game is one of the 30 games on the Commodore 64 Direct TV retro game joystick released in 2004.

Inspiration
Unofficially inspired by the 1975 movie Rollerball.

Playtesting
According to Eric Matthews, plain programming only took one and a half months - but play testing and fine tuning of the game play took another four months. Spending such amounts of time on the game play was very unusual at the time the game was created.

Sequels
Speedball was succeeded by Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe. Speedball 2 had a greater and more lasting popularity than Speedball, and has been remade and republished a number of times.

Alternate Titles
"KlashBall" -- NES title

c64 - nes - sega master system pc - amiga - atari st