The 2026 World Cup is happening right now. Forty-eight nations. Sixteen host cities spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Hundreds of millions of people watching. And somewhere in that global audience are a few million people who, in 1997, sat in front of a television with a controller and played through their country's entire qualifying campaign before a single match of France '98 had been played.

That was new. And it happened because of one game.

What FIFA: Road to World Cup 98 Actually Did

Before 1997, football games simplified the global picture. You got a tournament bracket. You picked a nation from a curated list. You played the matches. It was the World Cup as a competition, not as a journey.

FIFA: Road to World Cup 98, released in late 1997 by EA Canada, changed the frame entirely. The game included all 172 FIFA-registered national teams that entered qualification for France '98. According to Time Extension's making-of feature, those 172 nations came with their actual regional qualifying structures built into the game. Confederation of African Football groups. CONMEBOL round-robin tables. UEFA's home-and-away format. You were not dropped into a generic bracket. You played the system your country actually played in.

That scope was genuinely unprecedented. No football game before it had attempted to represent the full qualifying picture of a World Cup, let alone build the mechanical structure to match each region's format.

Why the Number 172 Matters

It is easy to look at a team count and shrug. Games add teams all the time. But 172 qualifying nations in 1997 was a different kind of statement.

Consider the landscape at the time:

The completeness was the point. If you were growing up in a country that had never been represented in a football video game, FIFA: Road to World Cup 98 was the first time you could pick your national team and play a meaningful qualifying campaign with them. That is not a minor feature. For a lot of players, it was the first time a football game felt like it was actually about football as a global sport rather than a European club competition with a World Cup mode bolted on.

The N64 Version and What Made It Different

The game launched across eight platforms. The Nintendo 64 version had a specific quirk worth noting. Where PlayStation and PC versions loaded assets from slower CD-ROM drives, the N64 cartridge format was, as lead programmer Yossarian King told Time Extension, "much, much faster than CDs." That speed translated into tighter load times during matches and transitions.

The trade-off was commentary. The N64 version had to ship with "a very light form of colour commentary" without player names, because the cartridge could not store the audio volume that CD-based versions could. So the N64 version loaded faster but talked less.

"A real surprise." That is how N64 Magazine's Tim Weaver described the version, noting its "beautifully fluid" play and the dramatic improvement over FIFA 64, which he called "a complete shambles."

The game was well-reviewed across platforms. EGM gave it an 8.0. GameSpot gave it an 8.5. N64 Magazine landed at 83%. Not a perfect game, but a confident one that clearly knew what it was trying to be. It also shipped with a licensed soundtrack that included Blur's "Song 2," which made the whole thing feel extremely 1997 in the best possible way.

The Template It Set

FIFA: Road to World Cup 98 established that the path to the tournament was as interesting as the tournament itself. That sounds obvious now, but it was not obvious at the time. The game had to argue, through its existence, that players would want to grind through qualifying rounds with Cameroon or Jamaica or Morocco rather than just pick France and play the final eight.

They did. And the success of the format is visible in every World Cup game released since. The qualifying campaign mode became a genre expectation. EA released a separate official World Cup 98 tie-in the following year, and it included a similar qualifying structure. The idea stuck.

Football Games and the Memory of Watching

There is something specific about how football games encode World Cup memories. You remember the qualifying run you took Saudi Arabia on. You remember the penalty shootout that knocked you out as Colombia in the CONMEBOL bracket. These game memories layer onto the real memories: watching matches at odd hours, hearing the vuvuzelas or the crowd roar, knowing the results before you went to school.

That is the thing about gaming nostalgia and the memories games create. Football games tied to real tournaments are a particular kind of time capsule. They carry the emotional texture of a specific World Cup year, encoded through the teams you played and the campaigns you ran.

FIFA: Road to World Cup 98 was the first game to give you the full picture. If it was part of your story, it belongs somewhere permanent.

Log it at The EndWiki. Every game you played, every session that mattered, every national team campaign you ran through in 1997. Your gaming history is worth keeping. Create a free account and start building the record.