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.