Virtua Striker

Virtua Striker is a series of association football sports video games released by Sega for arcades. Originally developed by Sega AM2 from 1994 to 1999, the series moved to Amusement Vision with Virtua Striker 3, but it later moved to Sega Sports Design R&D Dept. with Virtua Striker 4.

The original Virtua Striker, released in 1994, was the first association football game to use 3D computer graphics, and was also notable for its early use of texture mapping, along with Sega's own racing video game Daytona USA. Sega advertised the game as "the first three-dimensional computer graphic soccer game".

Three of the games in the series have been released on home consoles. The original Virtua Striker game received Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 ports, distributed respectively through Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, in February 2013, exclusively for Japan.

Also released was Virtua Striker 2 (ver. 2000.1) for the Dreamcast, and Virtua Striker 3 (ver. 2002) for the GameCube.

History

As one of many series under Sega AM2's Virtua banner, the genesis of Virtua Striker can be traced back to Yu Suzuki, who presented the idea to Satoshi Mifune, with whom he had worked on previous Sega arcades such as Space Harrier and After Burner, and whom Suzuki knew to be a football fan. Mifune, however, originally did not have the same faith in the project, doubting a smooth transition, to the point of expressly declaring that, if the game was a failure, he would not try his hand at the genre again. The simple, three-button control layout resulted of a combination of factors: the lack of popular titles to provide a standard, the need to focus on the game's program, and for an accessible experience to players.