A penalty shootout in FIFA RTWC 98

This isn’t just the rooster-blue-tinted goggles of nostalgia, no: it’s the lost sense of freedom and joy and the connection to the real football world in Road to World Cup 98 that make it a beautiful bit of sandbox that stood the test of time, and a painfully sweet reminder of what a fun sports game could look like.

What comes to your mind when you think of a World Cup FIFA game? A chance to pick one team and steer them through the qualification, then play with all the usual big dogs in the real group stage, right? Well, yes, that is more or less what the experience is like these days. But boy oh boy, did things used to be different back in 1998.

There’s no reason for me to pretend that the actual match engine or the gameplay experience is anything to write home about today, but that isn’t really the point. After all, does anyone play FIFA’s league or career modes against the AI for a challenge? It’s just a canvas to paint on, and the more colors you can apply, the better.

And boy oh boy, was it a colorful palette.

The World Cup, your way

RTWC 98 splits the World Cup game mode into three separate stages that you can jump into at any time once you have unlocked them. The qualification, the group stage, and the knockout stage are all your oyster, and you can go straight to the last sixteen if you wish. And you are not limited to the solitary team: you can choose to simultaneously manage a ton of teams from a list of all 172 FIFA-registered nations—a massive roster that wouldn’t return until 2010—and do with them as you wish. You can play out a knockout stage of the World Cup featuring 16 of the worst teams of the world. No one is going to stop you. Not even Footix, the blue rooster that was the mascot of the tournament, who keeps on popping up in the menus over and over again with silly little idle animations.

When you select one of the sixteen real-life stadiums to play in, a video plays showcasing the locale and the venue. It was a nice touch that connected the rudimentary visuals with what they truly tried to represent, and it was a neat if small cultural touch that showed the test of time.

And that’s just the World Cup stuff. The game also featured a whole bunch of leagues and the many clubs involved, making it a full-fledged footie experience. But the real joy, as I’m sure many of you are screaming at the screen, is the indoor five-versus-five extravaganza.

Anything your heart desires

Remember the freedom I was talking about? Well, you can pit an MLS club against a European national team in a five-a-side indoor match, no questions asked. Just pure, silly joy, all underpinned by some decent electronica and a bit of Britpop.

EA stands for Electronic Arts, remember? While they have long been more about farts, it’s worth remembering where the company first positioned itself. And in a time when games were not as big a deal as they are today, branding-wise, there was more room for freedom and goofiness.

RTWC 98 is truly a trip down memory lane. Featuring nations no longer on the map and commentators who are no longer with us, letting you play football as freely as we can never do these days, makes it a special experience even in 2025.

To my mind, the last flames of this were extinguished four years down the line. Playing through the qualification stage in FIFA 2002, I was shocked and disappointed to see that it only included the qualis. But even that game, truncated as it may have been compared to RTWC, included fun little outtake videos like this:

We won’t see the likes of this again in any ever-so-official, microtransaction-laden football game. And that is such a shame.

The post Just writing to let you know that Road to World Cup 98 is still the best FIFA game and it is not even close appeared first on Destructoid.

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