If for whatever reason you think Baseball Doesn’t Exist, well, how about footy. No, not football i.e. association football (also known as soccer). No, not American football either. We’re talking about here is Australian Rules Football, also known as Aussie Rules, or simply footy. It’s a real sport, but if you never heard of it, you’d think it’s fake and doesn’t exist.
Which makes it ever the more silly that for many a gamer outside Australia, the first time they’d heard of footy is from a wacky game with power-ups that includes a Monty Python-style giant foot smashing the field and a DVD screensaver literally called Pro Jank Footy.
You’d either weirded out by Pro Jank Footy, or get a sensible chuckle over its retro-looking aesthetic that gives off International Superstar Soccer energy (but not Sensible Soccer), arcade style gameplay and the surreal, satirical tone it got going here.
On that note, the developer, Powerbomb Games is collaborating with David Ashby as its creative director. Ashby is mostly known for as a film and TV director, and as the co-creator of the satirical comedy series Danger 5. It’s the TV show with the presentation of a show made in the 50’s set in World War II, most of the world would know it as the source of that Sensible Chuckle gif.
“When we exhibited Pro Jank Footy in Japan, a lot of players didn’t even realize our game was based on a real sport, let alone a billion-dollar industry,” said David Ashby, Creative Director, Powerbomb Games. “We hope that this sentiment continues as more people play our game. It’s a really tasty thought to think that Pro Jank Footy has the potential to distort the world’s view of Australian Rules Football. It would be a real good thing, considering we take footy incredibly seriously down under.”
Pro Jank Footy lets you pick from 10 fictional teams (one of them are forklift certified, apparently) and have two of them kick and carry the footy across four different oval-shaped stadiums. Pro Jank Footy supports couch co-op and online play.
The twist, that makes this footy game jank, is that there ridiculous literal game-changing power-ups. We’re talking turning players into seagulls, make them tiny, more goalposts, and that DVD screensaver. If it somehow touches the corner of the screen (a very rare chance, but a hype moment when it does), the game just ends.
Pro Jank Footy also has a single-player mode, Season Mode, where it becomes a roguelike.
Sports games that twists the rules are commonplace enough, look at the variety of non-serious, non-sim golf games that are out there. But these are established sports which gamers know the baseline and can see where the funny twist to the rules are.
Pro Jank Footy will launch on August 12 for the PS5, PC (Steam), Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.