The story of Marko’s Magic Football, a Hollywood-pitch style union (platform games are popular! Football games are popular! Let’s combine them!), begins not at Domark but at fellow 8-bit software house, Digital Integration. Working at DI was Tony West, who, along with his brother Chris, had already developed the well-received shoot-’em-up RISK for The Edge. When Digital Integration freelancer John Kavanagh joined Domark in 1989, Tony got word that the publisher was looking for development teams to partner with. Along with Chris, Colin Boswell, Marcus Goodey and Paul Margrave, he formed Quixel. “Domark had just acquired the rights to the new James Bond film, Licence To Kill,” says Tony. “We were contracted to do the C64, Spectrum, Amstrad, Atari ST, Amiga and PC versions.” After the mixed critical success of Domark’s previous Bond adaptation, The Living Daylights, Quixel did a decent job on the second Timothy Dalton movie, securing the arcade conversion Cyberball.
Like many larger UK software houses, Domark had concluded that it needed high-profile arcade conversions to survive. The results were mixed, to say the least, and Quixel’s continued that trend; but a significant change was just around the corner for both developer and publisher. “Domark was looking at getting into console games,” recalls Tony, “but Sega and Nintendo both required publishers to have their own, and followed, alongside conversion jobs such as the Master System port of . However, original games remained thin on the ground before half of Domark’s founding pair, Mark Strachan (the ‘mark’ of Domark, with the ‘Do’ being Dominic Wheatley), had an idea – or at least part of an idea. “Mark said he wanted to do a game based around football,” recalls Tony, “but not an actual football game. He left it with me to think of something.” It’s likely that the 1990 World Cup inspired the Domark cofounder rather than the massive glut of football videogames that followed in the wake of England’s ‘semi’-success.
