Starbyte Super Soccer is one of those early football management games (genre: strategy). The name had to be chosen that way because there were other products with the same name Super Soccer, for example from Nintendo. And Starbyte itself already had another soccer strategy game on offer with Soccer Manager Plus (1989). Two years later, the new Starbyte Super Soccer focused on the German Bundesliga and tried to be as accurate as possible. The football management video game was released in 1991 and was playable on various platforms such as DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, and Commodore 64. The original built was developed by Dirk Weigand on Atari ST. The following Amiga version was ported by the Swiss developer René Straub and a German team of Starbyte devs.

The game is a strategy game that incorporates both simulation elements and sporting aspects of soccer. The game offers a management perspective on soccer, allowing players to take on the role of a team manager. The game focuses on a detailed representation of the German Bundesliga, with the aim of simulating the league as realistically as possible. Players have the opportunity to lead their teams through different seasons, taking into account both the tactical and financial aspects of club management. The graphics and gameplay reflect the state of the art in the early 1990s.

The formation of the own team and the match tactics for each game are the heart of the soccer manager game. In Starbyte Super Soccer as in other similar games, the matches themselves are not visually shown or performed. Each time after finishing formation and tactics, the player gets a result and a report on the match.

The original development was done by Dirk Weigand. As a teenager he had worked on the predecessor Kicker and released his football manager in 1990/91 under a label that he called PolarSoftware. Kicker was one of the first German-language soccer management games. Weigand, who lived in Troisdorf (north of Bonn), was inspired by the 1984 Footballmanager on the ZX Spectrum and started working on his own football manager in 1987. His new football game was supposed to stand out from other comparable games with several new features. Brother Frank and stepfather Bernd helped at least conceptually and with constant testing. 16-color sprites were contributed by Oliver Merklinghaus. And Dirk Weigand won the listing of the month in Atari Magazine for the month of January 1989. After a deal fell through, Weigand self-published the game under the name Kicker in 1990 and distributed it as a shareware program.

At the beginning of 1991 the German publisher Starbyte Software from Bochum contacted Dirk Weigand and made a deal with him. They ported it to Amiga, DOS and C64 and by the end of 1991 they were able to sell the game for four platforms. The Amiga version of Starbyte Super Soccer was programmed by Swiss René Straub, who had already worked on other ports for Starbyte Software.

You find more information on Dirk Weigand’s story with Kicker and Starbyte Super Soccer in Beat Suter’s Blog The dawn of the German Football Management Games on https://doi.org/10.58079/vffg.