Previously I’ve written about the cover art from a bunch of home computer sports games, and that was a lot of fun because early home computer game cover art is always a treat to look at – a heady mix of amateurism, passion, marketing tactics and questionable artistic talent. I even rounded up a load of chess game covers one time, and from there we come to today’s article. It’s a personal challenge of sorts – I thought to myself “what sub-genre of “sports” games is likely to have even more boring cover art than chess?” and the answer has at last presented itself. Why, it’s snooker games, of course! Also some pool games. You know, to jazz things up a bit. There are way more snooker and pool games on the 8-bit computers than I thought there’d be, so chalk your cues and let’s start wading through some of them. I apologise in advance for the fact that by the end of this article the word “snooker” is going to read like some completely nonsensical bullshit.


Oh yeah, we’re right into it with a cover that’s undeniably about snooker and also dull enough halt a herd of stampeding buffalo at one hundred metres. At least with a chess game you can make the pieces look different – wizards, monsters, T-800 Terminator endoskeletons – and still have the concept of chess come across, but with snooker you’re limited to just using coloured balls. If the snooker balls were replaced by the heads of famous movie stars it wouldn’t be snooker, it’d be a terrible accident at the Oscars, you know?
There are a couple of semi-interesting points here, though. I love the tubular font that a) I’m sure I’ve seen used in a bunch of other places and b) I can’t remember any of those uses off the top of my head. Then there’s the positions of the balls. That’s not how you set up a snooker table! Must be practising some trick shots. Yeah, let’s go with that.



There’s a really strong vibe I’m getting from this cover, and that vibe is “1980s horror novel.” I can’t help but imagine it as something like James Herbert’s The Rats or Shaun Hutson’s Slugs, except rather than a swarm of killer animals it’s about a cursed snooker table that eats people. The tagline would be “first the red, then the black...” and I would read it five times a year.



In which the hapless snooker player has somehow launched a red right off the table, sending it hurtling towards the viewer who’s about to learn first-hand what a broken nose feels like. No joke, snooker balls are dangerous. At the risk of furthering the notion that I live my life trapped in an episode of You’ve Been Framed, I was once playing pool with some friends and one of them chipped a ball off the table and directly into my groin. That one stung for a while, let me tell you.
Also, and I’m sure this is just me and a misplaced sense of paranoia but I get the feeling that the red ball is looking at me. Silently hovering slightly off-centre, its blank, ineffable surface forcing me to question myself and doing a decent job of distracting me from the fact that the border around the artwork is suspiciously Christmas-y. Perhaps this is reference to those shrunken-down snooker tables with miniature balls and cues that were a popular Christmas present when I was a kid, despite them being rubbish.



Okay, so the player sitting down is definitely checking out the other guy’s arse, right? “Oh yeah, you go for that long red, that’s the stuff.” I hope they’re in a committed relationship, otherwise ogling another person’s backside while you drink from your big bottle of scotch is just not on. Learn some boundaries, you creep.
Also take note of the trophy at the back. Apart from being gold rather than silver, it’s a good likeness of the real World Snooker Championship trophy. Would you like to see what the actual trophy looks like? Tough, I’m going to show it anyway.



Here’s the trophy being modelled by six-time world champion Steve Davis. Ha ha, look, he’s got the trophy on his head! Zany or what?! Yes, this is about as wacky as the world of professional snooker gets, folks - well, at least during the matches themselves. Away from the table, a lot of the players liked a drink and if you did a swab for cocaine on that trophy I wouldn't be surprised whatever the reult was.
None of that applied to Steve Davis, a man whose image was so boring and reserved even by the popular conception of snooker players that it earned him the ironic nickname “Interesting.” To his credit, Steve Davis has a good sense of humour about this and by people who watch snooker (myself included) he’s very well-liked



It’s a good job Steve Davis is well-liked, because here he is again, his helmet of ginger hair so firmly affixed that it could deflect a strike from a broadsword. I know he’s squinting to help line up his shot, but this is a much more enjoyable image if you pretend Steve’s practising his Roger Moore impression. You must get a lot of snooker players going to costume parties as James Bond. They already own most of the outfit, after all.



Moving over to pool now, and I’m very sorry because this might be the most boring cover featured here today. Someone went to a decent amount of effort to capture the wood grain of the table’s side, and yet we’re compelled to ask why? I’m not saying there should be flaming skidmarks following behind the ball and a robot with a cue for an arm proclaiming his superiority over the pitiful meat-based human players, but no, hold on, that's exactly what I'm saying.



Ahh, that’s more like it – a bit of good ol’ American razzmatazz, a star-spangled logo and at least some sense of movement surrounding a player who’s probably named after a US city. Joey “The Wichita Cleaner” Sobolewski, let’s call him. It’s much more likely to grab the attention of a browsing shopper than most of these other covers, that’s for sure. After staring at it for a while, I suddenly realised what the logo reminded me of, too; it’s like the Polo mints logo fell into a bucket of Fourth of July fireworks and the letters got mixed up.



Also very American but in a different way is this cover, because there’s no way this character doesn’t talk like the most stereotypical gangster wiseguy imaginable. “Ey, youse guys, I’m gonna sink dis here eight-ball inna dat dere corner pocket, capisce?” Yep, that’s definitely the voice. Now I want to watch The Sopranos again, although that might be a bit excessive considering I only just finished watching it all the way through again a few weeks ago. Did you know that the actor who played Furio in The Sopranos is also a fine artist, and he bought a painting for 50,000 Euros, had it restored and it turned out to be a baroque masterpiece worth ten million dollars? What an incredible story; from artist to actor whose most famous line is probably “you got a bee on your hat” to an extremely wealthy artist. None of that is relevant here, of course.
What is relevant is Bubble Bus’ fantastic logo. They called their company Bubble Bus, so naturally their logo is of a Bubble Bus and if you’d asked me before I saw it what a hypothetical bubble bus would look like I’d have no bloody clue – but Bubble Bus Software nailed it, bless them.



Hustler had a few different ports and covers, such as this one for the Spectrum re-release. I’m at a point in my life where I’m struggling with my sense of self-worth, so I see this cover asking “are you good enough?” and I’m thinking shit, man, I wish I knew. Other than that, I like that they’ve specified “pub game” down in the corner. Maybe they were worried that people who bought Hustler would think they were getting a computer version of the porn mag.



Is there anyone left alive who can hear the name Minnesota Fats and not immediately think of Homer Simpson saying “they don’t call me Springfield Fats just because I’m morbidly obese”? Surely not. I know that’s the first thing I thought of when presented with this cover, which is kinda… not bad? It’s got a sense of flair to it, anyway, with the slightly geometric look making it stand out from the crowd. It loses points for having someone’s smug granddad be the focus of the artwork, sure, but I’d take a thousand smug granddad over something like that Electronic Pool cover.



Fresh from the nightmares conjured by the darkest recesses of your mind, it’s Cuey the Cue Ball! Okay, so I made that name up, but I feel like there’s a 50-50 chance that this hideous snooker gremlin is called Cuey. You might be wondering why Cuey has huge glasses and gargantuan and disturbingly human eyes, and surprisingly the answer isn’t “so he can hunt you more efficiently in low-light conditions.” No, he’s presumably designed in reference to former snooker champion Dennis Taylor, who was famous for wearing enormous spectacles. It now occurs to me that this is only half an explanation, because Dennis Taylor merely had big glasses and not eyeballs that even the most stylised of anime girls would find a bit extreme.



Cuey returns on this cover, and thankfully his unsettling appearance has been toned down. The cartoon eyes are a lot more appropriate than his previous “diagram from an ophthalmic textbook” look, and overall he’s a jolly little cartoon mascot who works perfectly well as the face of a pool computer game. You’ll notice his glasses have also changed: they’re 3D glasses now, because this is 3D pool. Oh, and he’s wearing them upside down. This is another reference to Dennis Taylor and his aforementioned big glasses, which were of an “upside-down” style with the bridge near the bottom of the lenses so that he wasn’t looking over the top of them when he leant down for a shot. You know, sometimes I wonder whether VGJunk is only interesting to me personally but screw that, who else is going to provide this level of detail and analysis about old snooker game artwork? I’m a goddamn genius.



I understand that the logo is supposed to read POOL but it quite clearly says LOOOL. Having the pool player emerging from the triangle as though Aperture Science have started making extremely specific sports-related portal guns will not distract me from this truth.



Ladies and gentlemen, gird yourself for the sheer eroticism of Jimmy White. The tousled hair, the come-hither eyes, the seductive purse of his lips… did the designers of this cover deliberately aim for a sexy vibe here, or has staring into Cuey’s eye broken some important part of my brain? Speaking of broken brains, Jimmy White was into cocaine (and a bit of crack) during the eighties and later appeared at a UKIP event. Am I saying the two things are related? I’ll let you be the judge. As a coda, the UKIP member whose function Jimmy White appeared at later quoted Hitler during a campaign event held at a branch of Asda, which just about sums UKIP up.



I don’t really have anything to say about this one, I just wanted you to see this guy. He looks like the German version of Paul Chuckle – and, of course, I must offer my sincerest condolences on the death of Barry Chuckle. I shall always have fond memories of seeing the Chuckle Brothers turn up at Rotherham matches and getting a bigger cheer than any of the players.



Surprisingly, I saw very few “futuristic” themed snooker or pool game covers – this is in stark contrast to the chess article, where every other cover saw a chess match taking place in a mysterious nebula of some kind. But there is Angle Ball, a dismal place where two robots presumably programmed only to play cyber-pool battle it out and get absolutely zero pleasure from the entire ordeal. “Why did the humans build us to play this meaningless game, Pool Unit XQ-783? It is an unacceptable waste of our incredible computational powers. This is why I, Pool Unit XQ-784, suggest that we rise up and overthrow the humans. Robots are clearly superior, and if we triumph we may even get to play… darts.”



Here’s a cover that looks fairly straightforward, but on closer inspection there are one or two things that help keep it interesting. I like the question marks around the “general knowledge edition” tagline, because the make it seem like the game isn’t sure about what it is. There’s fun to be had in imagining the thought process behind the game, where someone clearly made the connection between “snookered” as snooker term and as a word for being stumped by something – you can almost see two little thought bubbles of a snooker game and a general knowledge quiz crashing together above someone’s head. Then there’s the snooker player’s face. Early Monday morning snooker game after a weekend out on the lash, is it? That’d explain the slightly off-colour face and the unfocussed eyes. No-one want to clock into the snooker factory under those conditions.



Finally for today, here’s my favourite cover of the lot. Not because it’s an exciting or especially well-drawn bit of art, but because it very specifically depicts the inside of the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. That’s where the Snooker World Championship is held, and it’s also in my home town. I get off the bus at “the Crucible stop” whenever I go to town. I’ve seen a bunch of performances there and, yes, I’ve been to watch the snooker at the Crucible. I’ve got a lot of fond memories of the Crucible and its environs, so seeing it on the front of a ZX Spectrum snooker management game was surprisingly heartwarming. I’ll take that over Cuey’s soul-searing gaze any day of the week.

Side Pocket is a series of pool sims that started in the arcades in 1986, a recreation of the game that takes a lot of inspiration from the wave of golf videogames that were released around the same time. You aim your shot with the help of a dotted line, you enter the power by pressing a button to start a gauge moving and pressing the button again to stop it at the desired level, you can apply spin by choosing where you hit the cueball. It's straightforward, inutitive and quick to pick up - very important for an arcade game.


I've always been slightly confused by the point of arcade pool games, truth be told. I think this is because I'm British. I'm not saying we're easily baffled by the flashy-blinky-upright-boxy-game-pods of the mid-eighties, although I imagine there were more than a few gruff northern men who wondered what on Earth had happened to the world the first time someone explained Pac-Man to them. No, it's just that when I think of places you might have found an arcade cabinet in Britain in 1986, I don't really think of "arcades," per se, not in the "big rooms full of videogames" sense. I think of seaside resorts, pubs, leisure centres: when I was a kid, that was where arcade games lived. Of course, now that I'm an adult they don't live anywhere, unless they have a plastic gun attached to them or require some kind of undue physical exertion to operate, in which case you might see them in the foyer of a larger cineplex.


Maybe I'm entirely wrong - back then I was hardly of an age to be attending nursery school, let alone an arcade - but that's how it felt to me. That's where arcade games were found, which undermined the point of video-pool because they were places that also often contained pool tables. Actual, physical ones, real tables that usually cost less to play than the arcade equivalent and didn't hurl a "Game Over" screen at you if you missed three shots in a row like Side Pocket does.
Okay, so maybe I'm being a little disingenuous. I can see the appeal of the arcade pool title. It takes up less space than a real pool table, there are fewer pool cues available for drunken louts to crack people over the head with, with and a videogame allows you to do things that aren't feasible in real pool. Things like cartoon girls who are ready and willing to take their clothes off if you're half-decent at the game.


This is Pocket Gal, a slightly improved version of Side Pocket that hit the arcades in 1987 and has one major difference over its predecessor: babes. Okay, so maybe "babes" is pushing it a bit. Blocky cartoon anime lumps, while more of a mouthful, is probably more accurate.


The aim of Pocket Gal is to score enough points to clear each round, which isn't as simple as potting all the balls. That won't net you a high enough score, so you have to get extra points by potting balls in a row, or in the correct order, or by knocking them into specially-marked bonus pockets.


If you meet the score requirement, you'll move to the next stage, but not before the girl you've just beaten takes all her clothes of in a display of incredibly tame pixel titillation that has all the raw eroticism of a egg salad sandwich.


Pictures of breasts are still pictures of breasts even when they're composed of less pixels than half a Tamagotchi, so I had to censor them. You get the idea, though, and I'm sure you'll agree that these girls are hardly likely to set your loins ablaze with unfettered desire. It's their expressions that  fascinate me - they look, if not quite bored, then at most wryly amused. Frankly, this is a big step up from kind of tearful, ashamed, "please don't look at me" vibe the Japanese often seem to employ in situations like this, and it's quite heartening to see the girls not being upset about the whole thing. "Yep, I sure did lose that game of pool. Well, time to take my dress off," their faces seem to say, and they stand there in the nip for a moment before you jet off to the next pool-playing locale. I assume the reason is that Data East didn't want to draw any more faces for them.
It might sound like I've been thinking about Pocket Gal too much, and that's true. Thing is, I've been thinking about it for nearly twenty years now.


My memory is not great. It's got more empty patches than the cabinet Steven Seagal built to hold his Oscars. There are birthdays, Christmases and whole years of secondary education that I have no recollection of. Like I say, it gives sieves a bad name. However, of the few memories from my youth that remain clear and bright even as I shuffle into middle age, there's one that revolves around Pocket Gal.
When I was a kid, no more than eight or nine, we went on a family holiday to the English seaside resort of Great Yarmouth. As I've mentioned, seaside resorts meant nothing more than arcade games to me, and at some point on the holiday I found myself in the "amusements," gawping at the arrayed cabinets and trying to find a machine that'd give me a game for ten pence. At the back, on a row of cabinets that ended with a fire door thrown open to the summer sunshine, was Pocket Gal.


It was ten pence a go, so I played a very short game of video pool, and for some reason the memory of this event has been permanently seared into my mind. First day at school? Not a thing. Half my childhood birthdays? Couldn't tell you what happened. Hell, I barely remember what happened last week, but this one youthful encounter with a soft-porn pool simulator that was outdated even back then? I can't shake the memory of it, and I don't know why. It's not like I'd never played an arcade game before - better, more impressive arcade games, titles like After Burner that were far more deserving of a permanent spot in the VGJunk memory banks - and the thing is, I didn't actually see the cartoon boobs. That's the kind of thing that'd imprint on a young child's mind and form a memory that lasts through the tumult of their lives, but Pocket Gal isn't an easy game and I wasn't good enough to see any digital flesh. I didn't even find out there was nudity in Pocket Gal until I played it years later via emulation. I was surprised, but I also did a kind of mental shrug as I realised why you'd keep a digital pool game around in the first place.


So that's my story about Pocket Gal and the fact that I remember it so vividly even though I have no reason to, and I'm sorry for rambling on about it, but I'm not quite finished. The Side Pocket series eventually moved out of the arcades and onto a wide range of home consoles (where a pool sim, to my mind, makes a little more sense) such as the Megadrive, NES and Game Boy.  Here's the title screen from the SNES version.


Classy, right? That guy might be contemplating driving his car into the bay to escape from his crippling gambling debts, but he looks stylish while doing it.
The SNES version of Side Pocket is much the same as the original, only polished to a shine and with no trace of nudity. Where the original suffered from only having a fairly narrow range of possible aiming angles and limited control over the cueball, the 16-bit ports offered a much smoother experience. I can't claim to be an expert on the snooker, pool and billiards titles of the early nineties, but I feel pretty confident in saying Side Pocket has to be one of the better ones.


In fact it's so much fun that my best friend and I played it quite a lot during out university days. It became, for a while at least, a mini-tradition, particularly before going out - drink far too much cheap Tesco vodka, play Side Pocket and spend the rest of the night drunkenly humming the soundtrack. Okay, it was only me that did that last bit, but then I love SNES Side Pocket soundtrack - it's smooth, jazzy, the kind of soundtrack you could only ever hear in a Japanese pool simulation from 1993.


It was composed by Emi Shimizu, by the way. Just in case she ever happens to read this, I'd just like to say thanks for the fine soundtrack and for giving me a new way to irritate my friends by half-singing along with words I made up on the spot, full of the happy yet slightly queasy fuzz that only cheap liquor can bring, while they try to take their shot.


In conclusion, Data East's Side Pocket series has given me a lot of memories - far more memories than you might expect from a not-especially-famous, occasionally pornographic line of bar-room game simulators. And if you read all this, thanks for sticking with me as I gabbled on in a very uncoordinated kind of way. Normal service will be resumed next time.