1993's Bicycle-Kick Platformer Revived for $10

"Forget jumping on heads." That's the line QUByte Interactive leads with in the description for Soccer Kid Collection, and honestly, it's the perfect pitch for one of the weirdest platformers of the early '90s. Instead of stomping on enemies like every other side-scroller of the era, Soccer Kid had you dribbling, heading, volleying, and bicycle-kicking a football into them. The game originally launched in 1993, developed by Krisalis Software, and now QUByte Interactive is bundling the SNES and MS-DOS versions together for $9.99 across PS5, PS4, Xbox Series, Xbox One, Switch, and PC via Steam on June 18.

I love when a re-release like this surfaces because it reminds you just how experimental platformers used to be. In 2026, every indie platformer is either a precision Celeste-like or a Metroidvania. Back in 1993, someone at Krisalis looked at the genre and said "what if the entire combat system was football tricks?" You control a kid on a globe-trotting quest to recover pieces of the stolen World Cup trophy, travelling from the streets of England to other countries, each with their own themed levels and secret areas. Your ball has actual physics; you can keep it close for quick attacks or launch it for long-range strikes. It's a strange premise that no one has really tried to replicate since.

What's in the package

The collection includes both the SNES and MS-DOS original releases, which did have some differences between them. QUByte has added save states, CRT filters, multiple screen aspect ratios, and a historical gallery featuring original box art, manuals, and vintage advertisements. It's the standard QUByte Classics treatment; they've done similar bundles for other retro deep cuts.

At $9.99, this is priced exactly where a retro re-release of a game most people have never heard of should be. Compare that to some publishers charging $30 or $40 for a single ROM wrapped in an emulator with a menu screen, and QUByte looks downright generous. Two versions of the game, preservation extras, and a price that doesn't ask you to gamble on nostalgia you might not even have.

Whether Soccer Kid holds up as an actual platformer in 2026 is a fair question. Ball-physics combat in a 16-bit game could feel either charmingly unpredictable or frustrating, depending on how tight the controls are. But for ten dollars, the curiosity factor alone makes it an easy sell for retro collectors and anyone who wants to see what platformers looked like before the genre calcified into its current templates.

Soccer Kid Collection launches June 18 on all platforms. The SNES version was originally published by Ocean Software, while the MS-DOS release came from Krisalis directly, so getting both in one package fills in a small but real gap in '90s platformer preservation.