Cristiano Ronaldo is a playable fighter in Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. Do not adjust your monitor, that’s an actual thing that’s happening. As a game series that looks set to appear during official esports tournaments, you’ll soon have the spectacle of watching the Portuguese international superstar kick a soccer ball while performing sick combos. That said, the reception has been largely negative from the game’s target audience, who sees his main roster inclusion as taking a spot a beloved character might want instead.
But what if I told you this isn’t the weirdest cameo from a household name? Of course, plenty of renowned sports stars feature among Fortnite’s skin roster, and you can probably recreate your favorite players in Minecraft, but that’s cheating. No, we’re looking into the weird and wonderful examples, from commercially available games to fan creations that dial the absurdity to the max.
Sports Games And Their Licensed Beginnings
As a caveat to preserve my gaming credentials, not all of the games I’ll mention here are good. In fact, a fair few of them are terrible. However, they’re at least fascinating examples of how famous sportspeople have influenced this digital cultural zeitgeist of the modern age. But first, we should look at more conventional early examples that paved the way for what we’ve got today. Pong may be among the first commercially available titles that brought tennis home TV screens back in the 1970s, but it would take until the 1980s for officially endorsed sports games to feature a player’s likeness.
Basketball features a lot when it comes to weird cameos, possibly because it was the sport with its finger on the pulse, as two of its most famous stars at the beginning of the 1980s, well before Ronaldo was born. Julius Erving and Larry Bird were the cover stars of Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One on One for the Apple II computer. Ported to other popular PCs at the time, it was a relatively simple 1v1 action that also starred a referee making the calls, and a janitor who would sweep up broken glass after a slam dunk, while garbly shouting at the two players. It’s far from the most advanced game you’ll read about today, but we must acknowledge the first.
Fast forward a few years to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), where we find the most famous sports tie-in: Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!!. This boxing game was a sequel to two earlier arcade titles, each having a more puzzle-based focus. All the fighters, some with rather unfortunate stereotypes, have a tell that you must work out and counter to beat them. Mike Tyson served initially as the final boss, with ultra-quick and powerful uppercuts to send players straight onto the canvas. After the licensing deal expired, Nintendo would ultimately drop Iron Mike in subsequent re-releases, replacing him with the fictional Mr Dream, who coincidentally seems to be visually based on Rocky Marciano, a professional boxer in the 1940s.
Ronaldo’s Cameo Doesn’t Compete With The 90s Weirdness
The 1990s had some of the best sports gaming years ever, but were also a hotbed of weirdness. Of course, those in the know already see where I’m going with this. The inclusion of Ronaldo in the new Fatal Fury isn’t even the first sports celebrity to be a playable fighter. Yes, Shaquille O’Neal, another basketball megastar, was the catalyst for Shaq Fu, a horrible fighter with Pepsi sponsorship that barely works, no matter what console it was on. Somehow, it garnered a cult following, prompting a sequel many years later that we’ll get to.
As the years rolled by, other odd examples would surface. Before appearing in the Looney Tunes collaboration Space Jam, Michael Jordan lent his likeness to a mascot platformer called Michael Jordan: Chaos In The Windy City. The Chicago Bulls legend dunks on basketball-headed zombies and other monsters in various horror-themed locations, while also fending off legions of paparazzi on a Chicago subway train. Like most average-rated Super Nintendo games of the time, the controls are floaty, and the maze-like first few levels might be enough to put off most who try it.
The pendulum can swing the other way, with bizarre additions to an already-stacked roster. Take, for example, the PlayStation version of NBA Jam Tournament Edition and its super secret characters. By day, the 42nd President, Bill Clinton, governed an entire country from the Oval Office. By night, he was shooting hoops with his wife against the NBA’s finest. However, basketball would also be the inspiration for the strangest celebrity tie-in. For that, we need to explore how a licensing deal led indirectly to the creation of a post-apocalyptic JRPG.
Those Strange Tie-Ins Never Went Away
Years later, other sporting names outside basketball would also break away to star in games. This was largely dominated by extreme sports thanks to the success of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, lending their names to skateboarding, BMX, and snowboarding games among many other cash-ins. However, even big names for conventional sports were getting in on the act well before Ronaldo did, and for the Game Boy Advance of all things.
Take, for example, Go! Go! Beckham: Adventure on Soccer Island, which features a heavily cartoony rendition of the England international football sensation David Beckham as the main character. In it, you must guide him across many levels on a soccer-themed island, rescuing it from the clutches of Mister Woe and his League of Monsters. It’s a little hidden gem if you can get over the cheap production, such as the mushroom springs sounding like a man quietly mewing like a cat.
This practice continued well into the 2010s, as Shaq once again took to our screens, whether we wanted him to or not, in a game equally as awful as his first. In Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn, our basketball ‘hero’ is reborn as a mystical martial artist, saving the earth against the demonic minions of a Chinese god of death, Yen-Lo-Wang. You can tell that this game never takes itself seriously, as it genuinely opens with Shaq himself saying, “My story is convoluted and full of holes, so pay attention.” This mercifully short indie game isn’t all that fun to play with mediocre combat, but it’s at least ‘creative’ to an extent, with bosses at the end of each stage, including one that’s just a big ass with wings.
The Legend Of Barkley Shut Up And Jam Gaiden
Despite everything mentioned so far, even after Ronaldo’s debut in Fatal Fury, he has a lot to catch up on. No sports star in history has had quite the storied videogame career as Charles Barkley. Back in the 1990s, he lent his name to two basketball titles with the catchy title Barkley Shut Up and Jam!. Compared to other simulations at the time, they weren’t anything too special, other than the fact that you could perform different types of slam dunks, and players were playing street basketball on the roofs of skyscrapers.
The next game, though, is an entirely unrelated and unofficial project made by a small team of geniuses who never played either of the previous ones and just wanted to make something they found funny. Barkley’s Shut Up and Jam Gaiden: Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa is a turn-based indie role-playing game set in a “Post-Cyberpocalyptic Neo New York”. The story starts with a prologue where Barkley is blamed for a “Chaos Dunk” that kills millions of people in Manhattan. Yes, this is a real and free game that you can play, and it still holds up in a somewhat twisted way by incorporating mechanics from other popular Japanese role-playing games of the time. What’s more, among the first set of enemies are the b-ball zombies from Chaos In The Windy City, which brings us somewhat full circle for 90s basketball references.
So yes, Cristiano Ronaldo becoming a playable fighter in Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves is an odd choice that fighting game fans will likely reject. It will never be a sentence I’ll ever get used to saying, but at least he’s being treated as a serious contender. His moves are soccer-themed, emphasizing his crazy footwork as part of his combos, but they’re at least grounded within the setting. It’s not as if Ronaldo is fleeing from a horde of cybernetic cops or thumping a soccer ball at undead beasts.
Published: Apr 22, 2025 09:00 am