The Pro Evolution Soccer Mod is back, this time with the 1998 to 1999 season. If you remember the old controller layout, you’re probably already feeling your thumbs twitch.
For a certain group of gamers, it’s like muscle memory never left.
PES ‘99 is a fan-made mod for the PC version of PES 2021. It rebuilds the whole 1998 to 1999 season with a level of detail that borders on obsession.
Remember the first time you booted it up, the familiar strains of the intro music kicking in as you navigated through a menu layout that felt both new and uncannily familiar? Instantly, the design goals hit home: authenticity, nostalgia, and an invitation to relive football’s golden era through a digital lens.
Every team, player, manager, kit, stadium, and even the dodgy TV graphics are back. It’s a late-nineties football world, rebuilt so you can prove to yourself that football really was better back then.
Seeing Northern Rock and Yellow Pages ads isn’t just about nostalgia. They remind you of when life felt less digital and more personal. Now, those names feel like they belong to a world that’s gone.
This isn’t just a game. The modders went for detail over gloss. Beckham’s hair is back, and it’s spot on. The managers aren’t old legends; they’re younger, hungrier, and rougher. It’s like Minecraft for people who grew up with FHM.
As the world’s a bit of a mess right now, and football has been taken over by money, turning it into something fast, shiny, and a bit soulless, this mod has caught on and received so much love in the way it has, despite not being available yet. It’s a way to slow things down and remember when culture was about discovery, not just algorithms.
Like many forms of nostalgia, it’s a rose-tinted journey back to our teenage years and those moments of camaraderie, allowing us to relive the joy of connection in a room with the curtains half shut, eating oven chips, and away from a world that often feels disconnected.
Recreating 98 to 99 isn’t just about laughing at midfielders who look like a cross between a plumber and Roy Keane as a Dickensian convict. It’s also a digitally native millennial way of fighting back against the way culture’s been flattened and broken up. And PES99 is an attempt to put it back together and bring back a bit of surprise.
Either that, or just an opportunity to see whether muscle memory can still whip a first-time cross onto the head of a blocky Teddy Sheringham or whether the shading on David Batty’s fringe sits exactly right.
