Pro Evolution Soccer

• 1. Introduction

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  Pro Evolution Soccer, Konami's football series, once listed the Dutch goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar as Oranges025. Johan Cruyff appeared as Oranges082. Konami lacked the rights from the Dutch football association, so an entire national squad turned into a column of serial numbers.

  In Japan the series goes by the name Winning Eleven. By December 2020 it had sold 111 million copies worldwide, along with 400 million mobile downloads. The Guardian described its fight with EA Sports' FIFA games as the greatest rivalry in the history of sports video games.

  How did a game with invented team names become a serious challenger to the market leader? Why did fans spend years rebuilding it by hand, against the publisher's wishes? And what happened when a series that had carried the letters PES for nearly twenty years finally dropped them?

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• 2. Arcade Versus Simulation

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  International Superstar Soccer reached the Super Nintendo in 1994, and Konami's long contest with the FIFA games began there. Three years later, International Superstar Soccer Pro arrived on the PlayStation in 1997. Critics called it a game-changer, at a time when FIFA had dominated home consoles for several years.

  Konami Tokyo built a new 3D engine for the game. It produced better graphics and more sophisticated play than its rival. FIFA took an arcade-style approach, while ISS Pro leaned toward simulation, with nine strategy options available during a match to reward tactics and improvisation.

  That design gave birth to Pro Evolution Soccer. Fans came to describe the series as faster-paced and more tactical, with varied, unscripted moments. FIFA, meanwhile, was known for holding more licences.

  The early sales race was closer than the later one. By 2002 the PES series had passed 10 million units. FIFA had already sold over 16 million by 2000.

  In the late 2000s, EA and Konami began borrowing ideas from each other's games. Poor impressions of PES 2008, set against better-than-expected impressions of FIFA 08, then tipped the balance. FIFA pulled ahead by a wide margin in the early 2010s and became the most successful sports video game franchise in the world.

  Behind the rivalry sat a naming puzzle. The same Konami game wore a different title in almost every region it reached.

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• 3. Many Names, Many Branches

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  In July 1995, J-League Jikkyou Winning Eleven appeared on the PlayStation, and only in Japan. It featured just the 14 clubs that played in the 1995 J.League. Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo went on to make Goal Storm, which Japanese players knew as World Soccer Winning Eleven.

  The next three games came from the same Tokyo team. Europe received them as ISS Pro, while the rest of the world used the Winning Eleven name. Every one of them ran on the PlayStation alone.

  The first game actually titled Pro Evolution Soccer reached Japan on the 25th of October 2001, as World Soccer: Winning Eleven 5. It came out for both PlayStation and PlayStation 2, with the tagline "We are the Football Tribe". Jon Briggs and Terry Butcher provided the commentary.

  Names kept shifting after that. In the United States, the sixth game was sold as Winning Eleven: Pro Evolution Soccer 2007. Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 became the first entry to drop the Winning Eleven name there.

  The family also grew sideways. A Japan-only J-League line continued through editions up to 2010, all on PlayStation 2. Management spin-offs included Winning Eleven Tactics: J.League, released in Japan on the 12th of December 2003, and Pro Evolution Soccer Management, released in Europe on the 24th of March 2006.

  Arcade cabinets, Game Boy Advance titles and a Nokia edition of Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 followed. On phones, World Soccer Collection S launched in Japan on the 27th of June 2013 as a card collecting game. Pro Evolution Soccer Club Manager reached the world on the 5th of June 2015. The card game eFootball Champion Squads followed on the 31st of October 2017, on Android, iOS and Windows through Google Play Games.

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• 4. The Master League

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  Castolo, a Brazilian forward invented for the game, became a cult figure among Master League players. The mode let a player take charge of a team of their choice. Originally every player was a generic, fictional creation. Later, an option let players switch to the default roster instead.

  The goal was to win matches, cups and leagues, which earned points. Those points bought real players to join the squad. Done well, the process ended with a team of real quality.

  The mode grew with the series. The second game added an extra division. In the third, the Master League split into regional divisions, with competitions modelled on the Champions League and the UEFA Cup.

  The third game also brought growth and decline curves. A player's statistics could rise or fall with training and age. That gave real value to a young prospect whose abilities climb, and a trade-off for anyone tempted by skilled but fading veterans.

  In the fourth game, the curves became clearer. Players over 30 saw certain attributes decline as seasons passed. Players could improve up to the age of 24-25, with the fastest and most obvious gains at 22 and under.

  Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 added Become a Legend, which followed one player rather than a whole team. He moved to better clubs, earned national team caps and won MVP awards. Its blueprint was Fantasista, a mode in the Japan-only J-League Winning Eleven 2007 Club Championship, and it is credited with inspiring the Be a Pro mode in FIFA 08.

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• 5. Aliases and Licences

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  In the second game, Manchester United was no longer called Manchester, nor Real Madrid called Madrid. Konami had swapped those obvious city names for vague ones. Manchester United became Aragon, Liverpool became Europort, and West Ham became Lake District. A club editor let players restore the real names, along with kits and logos.

  The third game, in 2003, replaced the Dutch serial numbers with pseudonyms. Patrick Kluivert, for one, became Froibaad. That game also fully licensed six clubs: A.C. Milan, SS Lazio, AS Roma, Juventus, Parma and Feyenoord. South Korea was added as a national team.

  Pro Evolution Soccer 4, released in 2004, was the first with full leagues for England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. Only the last three held full league licences. English clubs therefore got awkward names. Chelsea became West London Blue and Manchester United became Man Red. Their grounds turned into Blue Bridge and Trad Brick Stadium.

  Arsenal, Chelsea, Celtic and Rangers arrived with real licences in the fifth game. The sixth made the French Ligue 1 fully licensed for the first time, and added Bayern Munich, Boca Juniors with its La Bombonera stadium, and São Paulo FC. The Chelsea licence was removed, and a lawsuit forced Konami to drop the Bundesliga.

  Some details lagged behind reality. Arsenal still played at Highbury rather than the Emirates. Bayern Munich still played in Munich's Olympic Stadium. Serbia and Montenegro survived in the game after the country dissolved in May 2006, because it had competed at that year's World Cup. Retired players such as Zinedine Zidane still appeared in the World Cup squads.

  Competition licences came later. PES 2009 was the first with the UEFA Champions League licence. In real life the game sponsored Lazio once, in a match against Inter Milan, but the in-game kit did not carry the sponsor. PES 2010 added the UEFA Europa League, and PES 2011 fully licensed the Copa Libertadores and the UEFA Super Cup.

  PES 2013 included all 20 teams of the Campeonato Brasileiro Serie A for the first time. PES 2015 featured unlicensed secondary leagues, a first for the series outside regional versions with J and K-Leagues.

  On the 26th of July 2016, Konami Digital Entertainment announced a premium partnership with Barcelona. It gave the game exclusive access to the Camp Nou for three years. Then the big competitions slipped away. PES 2018 was the last game with the Champions League, Europa League and Super Cup until FIFA 19, after EA Sports took the licences. PES 2019 was the first in ten years without them.

  The 2021 Season Update brought a multi-year deal with A.S. Roma and S.S. Lazio. A.C. Milan and Inter Milan had signed exclusive deals with EA Sports, so they appeared as Milano RN and Lombardia NA.

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• 6. Option Files and Patches

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  Fans call their homemade fixes option files and patches. An option file replaces generic player names with real ones. It can also add the latest transfer window and sometimes adjusts the stats of obscure players whose in-game numbers miss their real skills.

  More experienced gamers edit the game code and graphics themselves. Their patches add accurate kits for unlicensed teams, new stadiums, and match balls from Nike, Puma, Umbro and Mitre, plus more from Adidas. Most patches also include licensed referee kits from FIFA and official logos of the European leagues.

  These patches are technically a copyright breach, and in places such as South America they are often sold illegally. Konami has grown less tolerant in recent years. It now encrypts the data for kits and player statistics in each new release. Fan communities invariably crack that encryption, and patches reappear.

  Some of the tools came from Konami. The second game's club editor allowed editable kits, logos and names. The fourth game added text and logos on shirts, which let players recreate sponsors, along with pixel logo editing. In 2008 the editor was a large downgrade, with no shirt text for unlicensed teams. Yet the PC version allowed face pictures to be uploaded or photographed through a webcam.

  PC versions drew modders for another reason. The third game was essentially a direct conversion of PlayStation 2 code, which made fan-made mods easy to download. In the fifth game on PlayStation 2, crowds were drawn as flat animated bitmaps to keep the framerate playable. Stands could look empty from certain angles. Fans patched the PC version, though no official patch came.

  From the sixth game on, one league held 18 generic teams named Team A, Team B and Team C, fully editable. It is thought to exist because Konami failed to secure the German Bundesliga rights. Patch makers often turn it into the Bundesliga. Most people use it to drop edited players into playable teams from the start, skipping the Master League. The Wii version has no such league, though its regular teams can still be edited.

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• 7. Release by Release

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  Queen's "We Will Rock You" opened Pro Evolution Soccer 2, released in October 2002, and "We are the Champions" closed out a final. Opinion split on the sequel. Some felt it was a slight step back from the original, while others thought it improved. Play ran faster, with sharper turns and quicker reactions to tackles, and a training mode arrived. Commentators Peter Brackley and Trevor Brooking were criticised for inaccuracies and for talking over each other.

  Pierluigi Collina appeared on the cover of the third game, released in 2003. Its graphics engine was overhauled, giving more lifelike players and a much better physics engine. The advantage rule arrived, along with improved passing and long balls.

  That game was the first in the series to reach Microsoft Windows. PC magazines received it well. Fans criticised the lack of an online mode and heavy system requirements, which excluded the common Geforce MX cards. Its rival, FIFA Football 2004, had online play and lighter demands.

  The fourth game improved the AI and throughballs, but critics found goals too easy. Players could pass through defences, or wait at the edge of the penalty area until defenders drifted away. A six-star difficulty became an unlockable item in the shop.

  Pro Evolution Soccer 5, released in October 2005, finally brought online play to PlayStation 2. Fans found it much harder, with punishing defensive AI and fussy referees awarding free kicks for negligible challenges. Some noticed three-star mode was harder to beat than six-star because it defended more. Official PlayStation 2 Magazine UK gave it a perfect 10/10. The PSP version lost the Master League, the commentary and all but one stadium because of UMD limits.

  The sixth game answered the complaints with more tricks and a more attacking mentality. On Xbox 360 it brought high-definition graphics and the series' first widescreen. Much of the gameplay and editing was stripped down for that release. The Nintendo DS version, released on the 9th of February 2007, looked and played like the older PlayStation games.

  In 2008, Konami introduced Teamvision, an AI that learns and adapts to an individual's style of play. Jon Champion and Mark Lawrenson provided English commentary for the first time. The PlayStation 3 version suffered from frame rate issues and strange glitches. A rather different Wii edition, Pro Evo Wii, followed in March 2008.

  PES 2009 slowed the pace and gave computer-controlled teammates smarter passing and goal routes. PES 2010 was a complete overhaul. It added 360-degree control through the analog sticks, with Teamvision 2.0 and reworked referees. Hardware limited the D-pad, so the Wii allowed eight directions and the Xbox 360 sixteen.

  PES 2013 let players aim passes and shots accurately. PES 2014 used a modified version of the new Fox Engine and was the last game on PlayStation 2, PSP and Nintendo 3DS. PES 2016, released during the series' 20th anniversary, gave Peter Drury his first turn as English commentator alongside Jim Beglin. A UEFA Euro 2016 edition put Gareth Bale on the cover.

  PES 2017 added Real Touch ball control and improved goalkeeping, and also came out on mobile phones.

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• 8. The eFootball Turn

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  On the 10th of September 2019, eFootball PES 2020 arrived on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Windows, with Lionel Messi on the cover. The new name signalled a Konami focus on online play. UEFA Euro 2020 was postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic, so the game was set to cover that tournament a year late. Instead of a full new edition for 2020-21, it would get a content update.

  In December 2019, Arsenal midfielder Mesut Özil vanished from the Mandarin version of the game in China. He had tweeted that the Xinjiang internment camps were a crackdown on Uyghurs. NetEase Games said his words "hurt the feelings of Chinese fans and violated the sport's spirit of love and peace. We do not understand, accept or forgive this." Özil was restored in the April 2022 update.

  On the 15th of July 2020, Konami announced the eFootball PES 2021 Season Update to celebrate the series' 25th anniversary. Messi was on the standard edition cover. Cristiano Ronaldo, Alphonso Davies and Marcus Rashford were named ambassadors. PES Productions was busy with eFootball 2022, so the update reused the 2020 engine. It reached PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows on the 15th of September.

  The real break came on the 30th of September 2021, when eFootball launched on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Android and iOS. It was Konami's first football game without PES in the title in nearly 20 years. Messi, then at Inter Miami, was on the cover. Unreal Engine 4 replaced the Fox Engine. Critics and players responded overwhelmingly negatively, citing poor technical and graphical quality and a lack of teams and features.

  The competitive side carried on. Konami has run an annual esports league since 2010, first named PES World Finals or PES League and now called eFootball.Open.

  Konami scheduled eFootball Kick-Off! for the Nintendo Switch 2 on the 3rd of June 2026. It is the first eFootball game on a Nintendo platform.

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