Premier Eleven: A Closer Look at the Lost Atomiswave Football Game

Throughout history there are numerous examples of the story behind the creation of a particular piece of media being more interesting than the final product. Take for example, the 1996 movie The Island of Dr. Moreau. A movie which was based on the 1896 H. G. Wells novel of the same name and which teamed a star-studded cast (Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer, David Thewlis, Fairuza Balk) with a hotly tipped up-and-coming director (Richard Stanley). In what is now a notorious turn of events, the final movie turned out to be something of a box office bomb, but the story of what went on behind the cameras spawned such tall and bizarre tales that the production has become infamous amongst movie aficionados. If you’re not in the slightest bit familiar with what I’m blathering about, then I implore you to seek out the documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau and be amazed at just how wild movie making can become.

Poster for the 1996 movie. The on-set drama
eclipsed that of the 1977 rendition.

With this in mind then, let us turn our attention to something much more Dreamcast-centric: Dimps Corporation’s ‘lost’ Atomiswave football (soccer) title Premier Eleven. We’ve covered the storied history of Premier Eleven here at the Junkyard in past, indeed I almost transformed into the aforementioned Dr. Moreau myself while researching it - at one point even visiting an arcade where a cabinet had been trialled back in the early 2000s, hoping and praying that there may be some remnant of it still in situ. Spoiler: there wasn’t. If you’d like to know more than is healthy about my recalcitrant obsession with this previously lesser-spotted arcade kickabout, please do check out our previous articles on Premier Eleven here and here; and you can read about the history of the Atomiswave arcade system (and its fascinating link to the Dreamcast) here.

A photo of the Premier Eleven arcade cabinet installed
at Clarence Pier, Southsea (UK) - Credit: John Baseley.

The long and short of it though, is that Premier Eleven was a football game in development by Dimps Corporation, which was planned for release on Sammy’s Atomiswave arcade system. After some testing in a few select locations, release plans for the game were scrapped, cabinets were unceremoniously slung into the fires of Orodruin, and the few remaining copies of the original arcade board ended up in the hands of private collectors. 

When the Atomiswave library was ported to the Dreamcast back in 2020, it was truly a marvel to behold and many a Dreamcast enjoyer was - quite rightly - overjoyed to finally be given the opportunity to sample such delights as Faster Than Speed, KenJu, Dolphin Blue, Maximum Speed et al. Only, there was a small hole in the collection of games being unleashed onto the Dreamcast - the Atomiswave library was not complete. Several games were missing from the catalogue, mainly due to being unreleased back during the Atomiswave’s heyday, and among them was (you guessed it) Premier Eleven.

Original Premier Eleven promotional flyer.

Now (well, in June 2026), thanks to a Dreamcast-Talk forum user who goes by the monicker ‘dimps’ (I see what you did there, dimps) Premier Eleven has finally been dumped and ported to the Dreamcast. Not only that, but this dump apparently came direct - and with permission to release - from a private collector who had in their possession a genuine Premier Eleven PCB. Even better, is that dimps managed to delve into the game’s code and release versions of the ROM which increase the default game time from a paltry 4-minute game length to both 12-minute and 20-minute game lengths - something which may not sound like much, but actually turns Premier Eleven into so much more than it could ever have been if left in its default state.

A Premier Eleven board went up for sale for $15,000 back in 2022.

The mystique around Premier Eleven, and that it promised so much from the promotional materials released back in the early 2000s, is possibly what led me to obsess over it so much in the past. The Dreamcast’s stable of football (soccer) titles is somewhat lacking when it comes to quality, with releases such as Virtua Striker 2 Ver 2000.1 and UEFA Dream Soccer generally being regarded as the cream of the crop (and cream always rises to the top, right?); but with Premier Eleven’s release, we finally get a chance to experience what could have been another option for Dreamcast-owning football fans. Well, if the Atomiswave games had been officially ported. And Premier Eleven had been fully released. And the Dreamcast hadn't had its life support yanked in 2001. You get what I mean, don’t be pedantic.

So then, what do we actually get with Premier Eleven? Not a great deal in truth. The game was always intended as an arcade experience and as such if you’re expecting something like Pro Evolution Soccer then you’ll be disappointed. No, this is squarely in the Virtua Striker mould (and in some ways it has more in common with the Super Sidekicks games), but hold that thought about PES because there are some similarities to Konami’s title if you look beyond the somewhat basic gameplay and impressive visuals and animation. Firstly, remember that this was an unreleased game that was never intended to be played on a Dreamcast. For that reason, it can be forgiven for featuring only a single play mode: a sort of cut-down World Cup where you choose a team from the 32 international squads available and then enter the tournament at the last 16 stage. You pick a team, get randomly matched against an opponent in the tournament tree, and then it’s game on.

32 international teams are included.

You'll start every run through at the Round of 16.

He's got a foot like a traction engine.

Hitting the post from 25 yards.
As Ally McCoist would say: shenshashional!

There are no options, no other play modes. There are no player names (although there are likenesses) and there is no way to change the camera angle. There is no play-by-play commentary other than a rudimentary International Superstar Soccer Deluxe style announcement whenever the ball leaves the field of play for a throw in or a goal kick. You can choose your team’s formation from a choice of two…but that’s about as deep as the technicalities get. No subs, no messing with player positions…you can’t even pause the action once a game starts. No, this is a totally barebones arcade football experience. But you know what? Premier Eleven plays a bit of a blinder when it eventually clicks into place.

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 FIFA and Madden entries lining pre-owned game store shelves, with not even a price sticker of a quid being low enough to convince buyers to leave with them.

On the polar opposite end of that spectrum is Premier Eleven, an unreleased football/soccer game for the Atomiswave — an 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 presumably a nod to the game's developer. Also, the coincidence isn't lost on us that this long-lost footie title is finally seeing 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 has also preserved another 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.

Retrospective: 90 Minutes: Sega Championship Football

The final rendition of the beautiful game to be released on the Dreamcast, 90 Minutes: Sega Championship Football was a title that many Dreamcast owners - me included - had quiet optimism for. We had already seen the likes of UEFA Striker; the Silicon Dreams World League Soccer based revival of the Sega Worldwide Soccer franchise; and the 'it's football Jim, but not as we know it' shenanigans of Virtua Striker 2 all come and go with not much in the way of fanfare. 

90 Minutes represented one final throw of the dice for a platform that didn't have a FIFA or a PES, but one which also had its logo plastered all over the football highlights every weekend as players from Arsenal, Sampdoria, St Etienne and Deportivo were banging in the goals. It was quite an odd juxtaposition that a games console that was trying to elbow its way into football culture (see also the Dreamcast Beach Football Challenge) didn't really have a killer app in the genre.

90 Minutes was going to change all that though. See, the big guns were on the case now with Smilebit, the same studio behind the incredible Jet Set/Grind Radio entering the chat. FIFA? PES? Ha! Sega is back and they're bringing their own ball. Anticipation was high for 90 Minutes, and it was only natural that with such pedigree in the driving seat that many were expecting Smilebit's first foray into football to play a blinder. Sadly, upon release it became painfully clear that rather than being a contender, 90 Minutes was little more than an embarrassing own goal.

On the face of it, 90 Minutes seems to have everything you could possibly want from a football game: decent visuals, a multitude of play modes, a pseudo-official license (player names, but not clubs) and the promise of a new game engine created from the ground up for the Dreamcast by one of Sega's most revered first party studios. Upon firing 90 Minutes up, all of the above seem to start slotting into place. The menus are practically bursting with modes and options; everything you would expect is present and correct. Want to create your own club with its own strip? Head out onto the training pitch to practice your drills? Select national squads? Tinker with gameplay speed and sound effects options? You can do all of this and more, all the while traversing some pretty well laid out menu screens as inoffensive background muzak soothes the lugholes.

So you've selected your teams, messed about with formations and substitutes, chosen one of the five beautifully rendered stadia to play in, and your choice of weather and time of day. So far, so good. And then you head out onto the pitch and the whole house of digital cards comes crashing down.

World Cup Qatar '22 lands on Dreamcast

The Dreamcast never played host to an official FIFA World Cup title for a couple of obvious reasons - namely that the console lived and died in the four year gap between the France '98 and 2002 Korea & Japan competitions; and that Electronic Arts held the licence for the official simulation of the tournament. Yes, we know there was also a Konami-produced World Cup '98 game, but they were too busy vomiting out Grinch games onto the Dreamcast to bother porting any of that ISS goodness.

I suppose the closest we ever came to getting an official football tournament tie-in game was Sega Worldwide Soccer 2000: Euro Edition, which aimed to capitalise on the 2000 European Championships; and while that game is decent enough, it doesn't really come anywhere near the best football offerings hosted by contemporary platforms.

Things are about to change though, as a fan-made 'official' World Cup Qatar '22 game has now launched for Sega's retro beast, bringing all the thrills and spills of the 2022 Qatar World Cup to the Dreamcast...sort of. When this title was first announced a few months ago, I was quite rightly very interested. I'm a huge fan of football and football games, and so to get a new indie developed football game on the Dreamcast sounded like mana was finally being delivered from heaven. Then the news filtered through that this 'new' game was little more than a fan mod of one of the most lacklustre efforts on the Dreamcast - European Super League - and my anticipation was replaced with the normal background disappointment that only a Manchester United supporter can truly understand. Sigh.

So then, I write this news piece in two minds. On the one hand World Cup Qatar '22 (or D.E.S. / Dreamcast Evolution Soccer, as it sometimes refers to itself) is simply Virgin Interactive's European Super League in wolf's clothing. It plays the same essentially - and I hate to say this - but it's a bad game. On the other hand though, one can't help but be impressed by the effort that has gone into this release. Meu Dreamcast, the team behind World Cup Qatar '22, have gone to great lengths to add all manner of cosmetic changes to the base European Super League game, with an impressive FMV intro, up to date international squads, kits, new pitch textures, crowd effects and even play-by-play commentary (of sorts) - something the original game oddly lacked. 

Strangely, there are lots of remnants of the original base game left unedited though, such as team names during gameplay and player likenesses - I'm pretty sure Edgar Davids never played for England, for example. The game is still only a 95% complete beta according to the file name though, so maybe these things will be ammended in time.

In summary then - World Cup Qatar '22 is a game that can't really be faulted when it comes to sheer dedication on the part of the modding team. It's a free update for an existing game that adds a whole lot in terms of aesthetic upgrades; but when the engine underneath is so lacking in terms of quality there exists something of a dichotomy. It's like buying a Lamborghini only to discover someone has replaced the engine with that of an Austin Princess. 

That said, it is totally free to download and try for yourself, so there's nothing to lose in giving this spirited upstart a trial. If the squad behind this release have the inclination to turn their attention to a superior base game (say, UEFA Striker or Virtua Striker 2), then things are looking promising for the future. If they give it 110%, naturally. Back to the studio.

At this point allow me to apologise for all of the piss poor football cliches included in this news report. And now you've forgiven me, feel free to grab World Cup Qatar '22 for Dreamcast over at the Dreamcast Talk forums, and/or check out some gameplay comparison footage here.

Retrospective: European Super League

If you spend any time on the internet these days, especially perusing Dreamcast news sites, forums and discussion threads, you'll inevitably encounter the notion that the system was 'ahead of its time.' In some ways, this is probably true - the VMU, the myriad A/V connection types, Spirit of Speed 1937, the internet connectivity and online gaming in an era when it wasn’t really standard for consoles...I could go on. 

There's another example of the Dreamcast being ahead of its time though: European Super League. Yes, 20 years before the eponymous debacle that shook European club football to its foundations, the good old Dreamcast was predicting the future of the beautiful game. And in time honoured fashion, the Dreamcast's version of the European Super League was every bit as dodgy as the real-life iteration that appeared (briefly) in early 2021.

Before you spit your cornflakes out, I know European Super League was a multi-platform release...I'm just desperately trying to somehow craft a relevant introduction to a retrospective on what I consider to be a pretty turgid football game.

To give some context, we have mentioned the Dreamcast's relatively lacklustre complement of football (soccer) titles here in the past, but European Super League is one we haven't looked at in any real depth. In fact, I'm pretty sure the only summary we've ever published goes a little like this: it has 16 teams. There is no commentary. It is unplayable. It has graphics like a Master System game. Do me a favour.

But now we're taking a slightly more in-depth look. Cough. Lining up alongside the likes of Sega Worldwide Soccer 2000, Sega Worldwide Soccer 2000 Euro Edition, UEFA Striker, UEFA Dream Soccer, Virtua Striker 2 and 90 Minutes, European Super League completes a team of also-rans that would make even the ever-optimistic Ted Lasso weep; and while that may sound a little harsh - as some of those games are at least passable - not one of them comes close to recreating the fun or spectacle of contemporary footy games on competing platforms.

The Beautiful Game

In the early days of the Dreamcast, Sega was riding high on a crest of positive publicity and the system was truly light years ahead of anything else in the console market. While Sega of America was kicking ass in the the US, the European arm of the company decided to take the crusade in a slightly different direction - to the packed stadia of the football world.

We have looked at Sega Europe's slightly misguided TV and print advertising campaign in the recent past, but one aspect of this assault on the subconscious of the 'casual' gamer was the decision to sponsor some of Europe's biggest football teams. And by 'football,' I obviously mean 'soccer.' Sega Europe sponsored four teams in total - Arsenal (England), Sampdoria (Italy), St Etienne (France) and Deportivo de la Coruña (Spain).