Jude Bellingham’s incredible last-minute goal serves as a reminder of why Pro Evolution Soccer continues to be a top scorer in the world of gaming.

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Football, like everything important in life, is a story. People get lost in stories. The position you were in when you saw Maradona’s handball, the strangers who embraced when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored his historic last-minute winner in the 1999 Champions League final. No doubt new stories have already been written about Jude Bellingham’s scissor kick in the dying seconds of Sunday’s Euro 24 match against Slovakia. Sport is a nostalgia machine. This applies not only to the actual game but also to video game simulations. Every gamer has their favorite football simulation, but for me and many of my generation, it was Pro Evolution Soccer, numbers 3 to 6.

It was the early 2000s, the era of the PlayStation 2. I was employed by Future Publishing as a writer, spending most of my time in and out of their offices in Bath, mostly writing for the Official PlayStation magazine. But during lunch breaks, all the magazine staff would get together and play PES. We would organize our own versions, especially for big tournaments. FIFA? Forget it. Konami had already proven itself with soccer games through its excellent International Superstar Soccer series on the Mega Drive, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, but the introduction of PES in 2001 took it to a new level of dynamism and detail. The pace was smooth, player abilities defined by 45 different statistics added depth and variety, and the controls were intuitive yet expansive. “These games felt like real soccer,” says Ben Wilson, who was then editor of Official PlayStation. “There was a real joy in winning 1-0. The modern game of football has as much in common with basketball as it does with football: you shoot, I shoot, you shoot, I shoot, the final score is 6-4.”

There were no flashy special moves to choose from, and magic moments were situational and had to be earned. “A game developer once described PES to me as a series of Street Fighter 2 battles played out all over the pitch over the course of a few minutes,” says Dan Dawkins, now content director at GamesRadar and then editor of Future’s unofficial PlayStation magazine, PSM. “Each player felt utterly unique in the game, and the ultra-precise controls made each moment of gameplay a series of high-speed, chess-style tactical decisions about how to beat the opponent and advance the ball, all based on the relative attributes of each player.”

Watching the Euros now, it’s hard not to reminisce. Twelve of us gathered around a giant CRT TV in our office games room, an old storeroom with a wire-mesh door that we called “The Games Cage.” “I have so many silly memories,” says Dawkins. “We called the players like locker-room mates: ‘Use Eddie (Edgar Davids) to lock down the middle!’ ‘Bertie (Roberto Carlos) curlers!’ We even created our own vocabulary for each game quirk, like Captain Pan Hands when a goalkeeper inexplicably misses a shot, or Jimmy Ghost Legs when a defender almost lets an attacker through.” I, meanwhile, was nicknamed Mr Chips because of my obsession with trying to knock a dinkball over the head of opposing keepers.

And we weren’t the only ones to get heated, thanks to the game’s intensity and its unique ability to simulate the utter unpredictability of the sport. “My favorite memory is the day the Unofficial PlayStation Magazine (PSM2), where I used to work, beat the Official PlayStation Magazine 9-1 in co-op,” says Dawkins. “Grateful to the end, we showed off a little trophy around the office and kept a mini-DV recording of the game on our desks, which we named “A Fistful of Dellas,” to commemorate the Roman Greek defender’s header that scored the ninth goal.” And what happened to that video evidence? “We stuck the footage on one of the cover discs for PSM,” recalls Nathan Irvine, who worked at PSM with Dan. “Yeah, we were that nasty.”

Over the next five game iterations, Konami’s team gradually perfected their interpretation of the football simulation, adding new animations and moves, but without tinkering with the core gameplay of complexity and unpredictability. Player control was “limited” to eight-directional movement, but like Street Fighter, this gave an extremely reflexive level of control. “The D-pad was really the best way to play,” says Dawkins. “FIFA later introduced ‘true’ 360-degree player movement, but this had a floating effect that for many years contrasted with the precision movements of PES. Despite the simplification and limitations of the controls, Felt “Like soccer, the illusion of control in a chaotic sandbox. A player’s incompetence can crush you, or a striker can lunge at a cross at the last moment to elevate you.”

Even the game’s quirks were endearing. Famously, Konami had fewer official licenses than FIFA, so Manchester City was called Man Blue, West Ham was somehow called Lake District, and Kenny Dalglish was simply called Dalmintz. “PES made up for this by offering the most extensive editing mode of any game, allowing players to modify the likeness and name of every athlete in minute detail. The internet was different in 2003, and PES fan communities (PES fans, PES games, Reddit) were filled with players sharing fully updated save files, which made the game even more accurate than FIFA. As I recall, this eventually led to the existence of the legally questionable “Magic PES”, where fans shared fully downloadable illegal versions of the game. We kept a few copies in the office for research purposes.

PES 6 was perhaps the pinnacle of its era – the Brazilian 1970s of football simulations. Fans will argue for PES 2013 or PES 2017, but PES 6 was the last game to top the charts on PlayStation 2 before the series jumped ship to PlayStation 3 with the heartbreakingly mediocre PES 2008. The buzz of the Future offices when the Gold Disc editions arrived, the whispers, everyone checking their watches and waiting for lunch, the sound of several magazine production schedules grinding to a halt.

“To me, this is the pinnacle of video game football,” says Irvine. “Anything could happen in that version, resulting in some incredible plays and goals. Oh yeah, we won the PES Media Cup in Dublin with PES 6. The PES Media Cup? Yes, there was a thing. PES was everywhere back then. It was incredibly recognizable and we knew we had to build on it,” says Steve Merrett, who ran Konami’s PR department in the UK at the time. “Our official Media Cup started with 16 people in a pub in London, but within four years we had grown to 64 participants, hundreds of fans and venues ranging from a wine cellar to a suite at the Emirates. We did all we could to support all forms of press and we knew how Future, in particular, took it. I probably spoke to Dan Dawkins more than I did my wife at the time…”

PES 6 was released in April 2006, just before the World Cup in Germany. “As soon as it came out I was thrown into a cage and played against other players for the next few days,” says Irvine. “I got told off by the magazines around me for being too loud. I know I sound like an angry old man, but the magic of PES, especially 5 and 6, is hard to match. The graphics are better, the licenses let you be on the pitch with your favorite players, but creating memorable moments out of nothing is left to the changing room. The attempt to be hyper-realistic has actually resulted in it being boring and predictable. In PES, the ball felt like it was just flying everywhere, and a simple move like dropping your shoulder or faking a shot to get past your opponent required real skill and precision. Played It’s like football. It’s not like the 300s and rainbow flicks of today.”

There was something PES 4-6 about Bellingham’s goal. It didn’t look staged, like it did in FIFA. It came from thin air, out of nowhere. A moment of instinct and luck, born at the perfect time. Up until that point I was skeptical of the tournament, but after the match I wanted to play PES. I wanted to chip the goalkeeper. I wanted to go back to 2006.