Viva Dino Dini!

The legendary Kick Off creator Dino Dini has signed a deal with Canadian developer DC Studios to work on an all-new football title - his first commercial project in over ten years.

The project has yet to be given a name or even a release date, but will be released on PS2, Xbox, GameCube, PC, GBA, DS and PSP - possibly the first title ever confirmed for all seven major platforms.

In true PR bluster, the proclaimed 'Godfather of football games' [steady, let's not forget Jon Hare/Sensible here - Ed] promises his forthcoming title to be a "revolution in football videogames".

And Dini is predictably scathing about modern footy titles: "The current generation of football games have no focus on the player - the game itself is the spectacle. This is a problem.

"It is the player's experience which is the key to creating a game which is accessible, playable and has long term appeal to players. If you can create an experience that satisfies the player each and every time they play the game, then you have created a classic," he argued.

And indeed, his track record was impeccable back in the early 90s, being the designer of both Kick Off and its still-incredible-today sequel, as well as the seminal Player Manager and the less-well received but-still-damned-good Goal!, which was essentially Kick Off 3, but published by Virgin, who didn't own the rights to the brand.

Since then, Dini drifted off into obscurity, occasionally promising to re-emerge with DIY projects such as e-Kick Off, but this represents his true comeback, and gamers from the 16 bit era will be salivating at the prospect of a return to his design ethics. Quite how he will be able to make the transition remains to be seen. It's well documented that Sensible's demise in the late 90s was almost solely down to an inability to translate the top down 2D gameplay of Sensible Soccer into 3D, and Dini may well run into similar problems with a largely unproven team working alongside him.

However, the dev studio's boss happens to be none other than Mark Greenshields, the man responsible for the NES and SNES conversions of Kick Off, among others.

"Since working on Kick Off I have had the desire and passion to show the world how a football game should really be done," Greenshields said. "I've always planned on DC-Studios creating a football game at some point, but wanted to wait until we could contribute something genuinely new to the game.

"Dino and I had some long discussions last year and it was a revelation as we found we both agreed on almost every level about what could be done to create a football game with a difference. The agreement between DC and Dino is very exciting and we're looking forward to showing everyone the future of footballing videogames," Greenshields added.

But who is DC Studios, we hear you cry. Well, the studio has offices in Montreal in Canada, and Brighton, UK, where Dini will presumably be crafting his next effort. Apparently the company was founded in 1999, and has worked on various conversions of titles including Salt Lake 2002, NBA Jam 2002 and the Tour De France Centenary Edition game in 2003. So there you go.

We'll be hopefully chatting to Dino Dini in the coming weeks, so check back for how this latest entrant to the football arena is shaping up.