If you don’t have much experience watching or playing cricket, the sport’s rules can seem labyrinthine.
It’s perhaps for this reason that video game adaptations of the beloved game haven’t been too popular.
However, as we’ll see, it is possible to break cricket down to some very basic elements indeed.
Ashes Cricket 2013
Let’s get the saddest story out of the way first. Ashes Cricket 2013 is considered one of the worst video games ever made.
Due to a raft of bugs, it only lasted four days on supermarket shelves before it was permanently removed from sale. To this day, it still hasn’t reemerged.
Fortunately, the 2019 instalment of the Ashes Cricket franchise (by a different developer and publisher) received much better reviews from critics.
The new Ashes Cricket developer in question, Big Ant Games, has shared the honour of making games about the sport with Childish Things since 2014, although the latter company has been releasing cricket titles since 2009’s International Cricket Captain.
This management sim actually pre-dates Childish Things’ inception by seven years, beginning as an Empire Games property in 1998 and making it the longest-running cricket franchise in gaming.
Cricket 64
Along with tennis, cricket has proved an ideal subject for video games since the earliest days of the industry.
In 1984, the very first cricket experience appeared on the Commodore 64. Developed by Ken Smith, Cricket 64 managed to display 13 players on the screen and featured famous names like Mike Gatting.
It did, however, only use six colours, with an emphasis on cactus green.
Back then, a large majority of video games were produced independently by individuals or small development teams, so releases were common and in short supply.
To put that point into perspective, twenty cricket games appeared between 1984 and 2000, including two franchises – Cricket Captain (89-90), which is unrelated to Childish Things’ effort, above, and Beam Software’s Cricket (96-97).
Stick Cricket
Much closer to the present, cricket has been adapted to suit a range of different hardware, including mobile phones and websites.
On Android and iOS, Sachin Saga Cricket Champions includes animations supplied by the legendary player himself, while Cricket Kings is an HTML5 slots game that can be played at BollyBet.
Sports games are an increasingly popular part of casino gaming, and more suggestions can be found at CasinoWings, with the variety of choices demonstrating the genre’s popularity.
Of course, there’s only one cricket game that really matters, the venerable Stick Cricket.
Originally made in Flash with only the most basic of graphics, Stick Cricket has since logged more than 70 m downloads thanks in part to its positive reviews and serves as one of the greatest examples of a modern time-waster.
The developers, Stick Sports, also created the spin-offs Robot Cricket, Stick Cricket Super League, and the multiplayer Stick Cricket Live.
While cricket’s presence in video gaming hasn’t always been worth writing about, there are still plenty of fun entries in its catalogue to date.
