“Heading, bicycle kicks, penalty kicks, and even fouls are no problem with this top-notch soccer simulation. 1-8 players can participate in this breathtaking game. Two players can play against each other or together on one team against the computer”, advertises the back of the game sleeve.

World Cup 90 is a football game based on the 1990 World Cup in Italy. All of the 24 national teams that participated in the tournament are included. However, due to a lack of licensing, the players' names are fictional. Players can create custom teams and change their names, tactics and the colour of their jerseys, as well as editing the team's line-up. There is a two-player mode (1 vs. 1 or 2 vs. CPU) and, through an additional interface, it is possible to add two more players.

Markus Grimmer, Swiss publisher of LINEL, had negotiated a deal with the German Gong Verlag and organized secondary releases of some of LINEL’s games in so-called disk mags. These releases started in 1990 with the game World Cup 90 (1990) by GENIAS, an Italian cooperation partner, in the Golden Disk 64 series, as well as in Computec’s Amiga Fun and Amigo! series, for which you could even get a 4-player module (Amiga version). The games were distributed by LINEL in the UK out of the office in North High Wycombe. The game was developed by two GENIAS crews in Bologna with producer Ricardo Arioti and the Dardari brothers as devs. LINEL cooperated with GENIAS in publishing and distributing some of their Amiga games in English and German.

A total of 150,000 copies of the simple football game were sold for the 1990 football World Cup, which took place in Italy. Grimmer explained in an interview by Beat Suter for CH-Ludens: “Only, we didn’t launch the game eight weeks before the World Cup as planned, but during the World Cup! Sales of the game did not begin until two weeks after the start of the World Cup. The potential could have been even greater.” About the different versions and their qualities, Grimmer knows: “The C64 version was the most successful. The Amiga version was the only one you could really play well. The C64 and PC versions were rubbish. The PC game was a disaster. All you had was one giant pixel for a head and two pixels that moved back and forth as legs, and a ball that was bigger than the head.” But the Italian partners were very excited about the sale. “They had probably never imagined that their games would sell so well.”

Even years later, the game sparks controversies about the quality of the individual ports. But a considerable amount of players loved the game. Walterg74 comments on Lemonamiga in 2012 : “ This was the BEST football game on the Amiga, period. The music was superb, you could create your own kits, and the gameplay was excellent!” And Girolamo85 says at the same time: “ Great sound and "strange-cool" gameplay. Different approach than other football videogames of Amiga, but that doesn't mean it’s bad. When you learn how to play, you become total addicted!” And Master Sly says (2012): “ Very Underrated game. Truly deserves more credit. I had a blast with this one.”