Eat the Whistle

Origin


Eat the Whistle is a soccer game developed by Hurricane Studios, originally released for the Amiga platform in November 1998 by the German Game Publisher Epic Marketing ltd. The original release date was scheduled before 1998 FIFA World Cup, but delays in the development shifted the effective shipping date to November. The game was released as 4 disks and CD-Rom, the CD-Rom version had an additional spoken comment in english, german and italian.

As the title of the game suggest the game the humor has a very important role in Eat the Whistle. The style of graphics, animations, sound samples and music contribute to the humor of the game.

The game was very configurable, with tons of animations and had two totally different gaming styles:


 * Simulation - let you play World Cup, Leagues or Cups with one real national team (with player names slightly modified for copyright issues). There were hundreds of teams available and the game included a tool to import Sensible Soccer teams.


 * Arcade - you play in a closed arena with walls as pitch borders and holes as goals, the gameplay is similar to Speedball (video game) and the teams are inspired by popular characters from comics/tv/games like Simpsons, Okuto No Ken or Street Fighter (with slightly modified aspects and names).

In February 1999 a free patch on Aminet added to Eat The Whistle the support for the Amiga PowerPC CPU card developed by Phase5. This patch make Eat The Whistle the first amiga commercial game with PowerPC support in the Amiga history.

The GPL release


The game has been re-released under GPL licence in the year 2002 by the original author. The version released under GPL was mostly rewritten and ported to ((Simple Directmedia Layer) to run on a large number of different platforms.

The GPL Version of Eat The Whistle is hosted on SourceForge and has been actively developed in the last years to fix the bugs and improve the gameplay. A network play feature has been added, but is not yet available in the binary release.

The actual version is distributed as binary for Windows, Linux and MacOS X, but there are available ports (and the patches are in the source distribution of the game) for AmigaOS, MorphOS, PocketPC, Irix, OpenBSD and BeOS.