Football games: How you wasted your life - in 35 short minutes

Clockwise from top left: International Soccer, 1983; Handball Maradona, 1986; VersusNet Soccer, 1996; Sega Soccer, 1990

Some people measure their lives in pets they’ve owned, books they’ve read or records they’ve bought. Fair enough.

For a certain breed of 20-or-30-something year-old men (or women, but mainly men), the raging billow of time passing us by can be measured in the annual release of football games. What was I doing in 1998? Mainly playing Fifa: Road To World Cup 98 on the PC and not doing maths homework. Great times.

An enterprising and nerdy group of Polish filmmakers at the company Davero Films have set about to remind those of us who knelt at the altar of hits like Sega Soccer on the Mega Drive (dreadful), Sensible Soccer on the Amiga (amazing) and the very first game in EA’s Fifa series, 1993’s Fifa International Soccer (a game-changer).

Davero has released a 34-minute film collating action from almost every football game of note from 1978’s Football by Atari right through to the high-definition Fifa 13 via lesser remembered glories like Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona (bizarrely produced by a software division of Argus newspapers).

This remarkable 35-year evolution – Pro-Evolution, if you will – is stitched together with the original 16-bit sound and blocky graphics and shows as well as any compilation could just how infinitesimally improved computer games have been in the last three decades.

For those of us that long ago said goodbye to our Mega Drives and for whom the midi techno soundtrack of Virgin Games’ Italia 90 still sends a shiver down our spine, this is as close as it gets to watching yourself age two decades in half an hour. Thanks for that, guys.