From the inlay:
Celebrate in Style with the Official World Cup Carnival
Follow the action, enjoy the excitement with
Computer league table and knockout football competition
Full colour World Cup league table
Full colour 'World Cup Facts' poster
World Cup supporters badge
Self adhesive World Cup flags
Plus FREE competition - a chance to win a Compact Disc Player
Enjoy the excitement of the worlds premier sporting occasion as the whole of the globe focuses attention on the ultimate in football achievement - World Cup victory.
Follow the action as it happens with your own computer progress chart, play out the drama of real match encounters, nation versus nation in your own computer football game and capture the spirit of this momentous competition and its Latin American setting, famous for its carnivals, the passion of its people and the fervour and enthusiasm they demonstrate for their sport.
World Cup Carnival. The only official football supporters' computer game. The only way for a computer enthusiast to follow the World Cup.
User Summary
This was one of the first officially licensed World Cup football games. Unfortunately development of the game did not go well. Stories differ - the story given to the press at the time was that a game had been commissioned, but turned out to be awful, meaning that an alternative had to be procured at short notice. In "The Story of U.S. Gold" two versions of the story are told, one that confusion within the company meant that nobody started writing the game at all, another that Ocean was asked to write a game, based on their Match Day II code, but confusion within Ocean meant that no game was written.
In any event U.S. Gold were left with no game and a very short time before the World Cup. They therefore commissioned Artic Software to slightly update their two-year-old game World Cup Football with a new title screen, the correct 1986 teams and a new penalty shoot-out practice mode. Artic Software's name was not mentioned, instead the game is credited to "Sport-Billy Productions", but is correctly shown as copyright 1984.
In an attempt to mitigate the expected poor reviews for releasing an outdated game at an inflated price, U.S. Gold pulled out all the marketing stops, heavily advertising the game and promoting the large number of pack-in items in the box. This was generally successful with approximately half a million units sold.