Back in 1984 you could knock out an 8bit game in little more than a week; well, a lot of them looked like they'd been made like that. One such effort was Artic Computing's World Cup Football for Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. The game was dreadful but there were few around to compete with it at the time. Now let's fast forward to 1986 and the Mexico World Cup. Brummie software house US Gold had managed to pick up the official license to the event and guess what? Yup, they didn't have a football game to release. The solution? Buy up the rights to Artic's World Cup Football, change the title screen, re-package it (in a big, big box with a poster and some other pieces of tat) and pump it out again at full-price.

People bought the game - that's marketing for you - because US Gold had obviously withheld review copies from the mags, and it wasn't until people loaded the thing that they realised they'd just bought, at full-price, the rubbish, two year old game from Artic.

Not unsurprisingly, when the magazines did get hold of copies of the game they panned it. Probably the most damning review came from the leading Amstrad CPC games magazine of the day, Amstrad Action, who awarded it a shocking 0%. As a bizarre sideline, one of the programmers who worked on tarting up the game for US Gold was a chap called Adam Waring, who went on to work on Amstrad Action magazine!