Unreleased Atomiswave Football title Premier Eleven has been Preserved and Ported to Sega Dreamcast (along with Miracle Stadium!)

Sports games often get short shrift from retro game collectors. Just think about the rows and rows of copies of FIFA and Madden lining pre-owned game store shelves, with not even the price of a quid being low enough to convince buyers to leave with them.

On the polar opposite end of the spectrum is Premier Eleven, an unreleased football/soccer game for the Atomiswave arcade system (that was based on the Sega Dreamcast's architecture). DCJY founder Tom Charnock wrote an excellent article back in 2022 documenting the community's quests to find and preserve it, with the ultimate goal being to port it to Dreamcast, as had been done previously with many other Atomiswave titles. At the time of Tom writing that article, someone had a Premier Eleven prototype board up on eBay for just under 15 grand (USD). Now that's one expensive sports game...

It was very generous of them to skim off those 3 cents.

Well, thankfully for those like Tom who have long lamented the Dreamcast's fairly underwhelming line-up of football games, the owner of a (or perhaps the) Premier Eleven PCB has finally preserved the game online for public consumption, with the help of Dreamcast-Talk forum user "dimps", whose online namesake is a nod to the game's developer. It also feels rather fitting that this long-lost footie title would finally see the light of day during the FIFA World Cup season.

If you'd like to play Premier Eleven on your Dreamcast, simply head over to the dedicated Dreamcast-Talk forum thread and download the supplied .GDI file, which can be played via emulators or on real hardware using ODEs such as GDEMU and MODE. The fact that we can finally do so honestly feels like a miracle!

Photo of the original Miracle Stadium Atomiswave cart, supplied by dimps.

Speaking of miracles, the same duo did actually preserve one other Atomiswave game: a baseball-themed title called Miracle Stadium. This one did actually see a release back in the day, but has remained the last publicly released Atomiswave game to be dumped online. Until now...

Once again, you can find the .GDI for Miracle Stadium on Dreamcast-Talk. dimps says in their post that the game, which was designed for kids, is "more of a curiosity than anything else" and "probably not something you'd ever really sit down and play." Well, I'm about to download it and stick it on my GDEMU, so I'll report back at some point to confirm if it's any good.

Photo of the original Miracle Stadium unit, supplied by dimps.

We doth our hats to the owner of these PCBs and dimps for their preservation efforts! Let us know if you'll be loading up either of these Atomiswave titles on your Dreamcast by leaving us a comment below.