Cult ’90s platformer Soccer Kid is getting a re-release in time for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The game was released in 1993 on a variety of formats, including Amiga, SNES, PC, 3DO, Jaguar and CD32, and was ported to Game Boy Advance and PlayStation in the early 2000s.
Now it’s returning as Soccer Kid Collection, which contains the SNES and PC versions and will be released on June 16 for PC PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PS4 and Xbox One, priced at $9.99.
Originally released to coincide with the 1994 FIFA World Cup – the last time the tournament was held in North America – Soccer Kid is a 2D platformer where its protagonist is armed with a football.
When an alien pirate called Scab tries to steal the World Cup trophy at the final of the 1994 tournament, his plan goes wrong when his ship crashed into an asteroid, breaking the trophy into five pieces which are scatted across Earth.
Watching this on TV, Soccer Kid – a young football-obsessed boy who lives in England – decides to head out and find the five pieces of the World Cup so the trophy can be put together again.
The game’s main gimmick is that most of Soccer Kid’s moves are performed with his trusty football. Soccer Kid himself isn’t very strong and dies if he touches an enemy, but he can kick his ball to kill bad guys and collect power-ups that are too hard to reach.
He can also balance on the ball and bounce off it to access higher areas, or pull off headers and bicycle kicks to hit different parts of the screen with the ball.
Soccer Kid was well received when it was originally released, with CVG giving the Amiga version a score of 89%, saying it was “one of the more original games of the last few years, and certainly makes a change from the haggard old platformers we’re used to”.
