World Cup Carnival

Release and sales

Initially planned as a US Gold in-house title, time constraints forced them to acquire Artic's World Cup Football (ZX Spectrum) and World Cup (C64 & Amstrad CPC), and fit the game with licensing tags and 'feelies' including a badge and wallchart, to release the game in time for the competition.

For many years it was believed than an unreleased, incomplete and presumably abysmal original version was lurking somewhere, but the 2015 book The History of US Gold reveals the full story - a communication breakdown between two US Gold staff members meant that both wrongly believed the other was working on the game. US Gold's Plan B was to get Ocean to produce a modified version of Match Day to fill the void, but again nothing was started due to a miscommunication. Plan C was the old Artic game.

Although one of US Gold's biggest ever sales successes, their reputation was not helped by the game. Amstrad Action magazine gave it 0%, and other reviews were highly negative. On forums such as www.worldofspectrum.org and www.lemon64.com , the US Gold game has a much lower rating than World Cup Football, despite being all-but identical.

Awards

• Commodore Format
  • July 1991 (Issue 10) - listed in the A to Z of Classic Games article (Bad)
• Power Play
  • Issue 11/1990 - The Worst Bluff Package (in the article "The Awful 10")