Rugby

Rugby is Sidam’s unlicensed copy of Atari’s Video Pinball, reworked from a pinball simulation into a Sports-themed game. By 1979 the Turin firm had spent a couple of years rebuilding Atari’s arcade video games from scratch,^[1] and Rugby carried that run into Atari’s pinball title — a machine promoted at its release as the earliest arcade video game to recreate pinball on a screen, its fluorescent ‘disco’ 3-D playfield of Bumpers, Slingshots, Rollovers and Drop Targets drawn entirely in the monitor.^[2]

Rather than merely rename the game, Sidam recast its whole visual environment.^[3] The title is an accident of translation: gridiron football had scarcely any following in Italy at the time and was taken for a form of rugby, which likely gave the game its name.^[3] Like Sidam’s other clones it was a from-scratch Solid State bootleg — a Video Game rather than a genuine pinball machine.