Foosball
Sports Games: Foosball
By Stephen Turk
Of all the sports games in the world, there is nothing quite as successful as foosball. Excluding video games, foosball is about as close as it gets to playing a sport without playing a sport. As far as tracking the game, it does not have a very astounding history, or really much of a history at all (at least that I could find, I’d love to know more) but it does embody everything that makes a sports game special.
The origins of the game are shadowy, with no one really knowing for sure when the game itself first appeared. There were apparently many soccer imitating table top parlor games invented in the late 1800s. Progress and popularity advanced the game’s technology from levers and gears, to the horizontal bars that we currently know and love by at least the 1920s.