Eat the Whistle



Eat the Whistle is a computer 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 the 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 commentary in English, German and Italian.

As the title of the game suggest, 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 many animations and two totally different gaming styles:


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


 * Arcade - allows users to 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 and games like Simpsons, Hokuto No Ken or Street Fighter (with slightly modified aspects and names).

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

The GPL release
The game was re-released under GPL licence in the year 2002 by the original author. This version 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 recent 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 Linux, Mac OS X and Windows but there are available ports (and the patches are in the source distribution of the game) for AmigaOS, BeOS, Irix, MorphOS, OpenBSD and PocketPC.