With Gaelic Football Laochra, Belfast developer Buck Eejit tries to succeed where others have failed and do digital justice to the GAAGaelic Football Laochra, by Buck Eejit, has attracted plenty of online interest since its release in May. Mon Jun 08 2026 - 13:00 • 7 MIN READA halfway decent GAA video game is the eternal El Dorado of Irish sport – a unicorn in the sky up there with a Mayo All-Ireland or Waterford making it out of Munster in one piece. Every time somebody new gives it a whirl, hopes are inevitably dashed and fans are left to down their controllers in disappointment. Forget Mayo for Sam – “GAA for PlayStation” is the perpetually unfulfilled pipe-dream for plugged-in Gaelic gamers. The latest attempt to do digital justice to the sport is Gaelic Football Laochra by Belfast developer Buck Eejit Games, which arrives with enough bells and whistles to drown out a Pat Spillane rant on The Sunday Game from back in the day. These include the endorsement of Armagh All-Ireland winner Aidan Forker, who graces the cover art much as Jude Bellingham and Jamal Musiala do on EA Sports’ FC 26. There is also a career mode and the option to design your own kits, so that you can create digital likenesses of your favourite club side. Mullahoran Dreadnoughts, your moment of glory is at hand. No matter how accomplished the finished product, a Gaelic football game is always a risky undertaking in that the potential audience is limited. And yet it turns out that Buck Eejit was tapping on an open door. As soon as it was confirmed that the game would be coming out on PlayStation 5, it scorched its way to the top of the PS5 “Hot” charts and, following its release on May 28th, ranks among the most downloaded games in Ireland – and has also attracted a prominent following on PC storefront Steam. “There’s plenty of interest. We’ve got nearly 29,000 followers on TikTok,” says Peadar McMahon, Armagh supporter and technical director of Buck Eejit Games. “We’re getting videos with half a million views and with 20,000 likes. These are great numbers we’re seeing.”Gaelic Football Laochra is not the first to take a swing at an EA Sports-style Gaelic football simulation. PlayStation fans of a certain vintage will be haunted by memories of Sony’s football and hurling sims of the mid-2000s, which according to some sources were among the highest-selling PlayStation 2 titles of all time in Ireland. Highest-selling – but also some of the worst received. As anyone who spent any length of time with Gaelic Games: Football and Gaelic Games: Hurling will recall, the titles were almost unplayable – with glitchy graphics and clunky tackling that betrayed the fact they were hastily ported over by Australian developer IR Gurus from its pre-existing game, AFL Live 2003. It was also far easier to score goals than points – which rarely leads to a happy outcome (just ask a Waterford supporter). But despite being horrible to look at and dreadful to play, the games have acquired a cult fan base and are remembered today with much nostalgia by those who suffered through them. That’s partly down to the sheer novelty of being able to swing a hurley with your joypad – but also because of the celebrated commentary by Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh, who arguably achieved his apotheosis as the voice of the GAA when announcing that the opposing teams would be “looking forward to a cup of tea and a banana at half time”. Still, for all these pluses there was the huge minus that the titles played like games made by people who knew nothing about hurling or football – as was, in fact, the case. “There were a lot of things in the original game ... goalkeepers, for example. They don’t have goalkeepers in AFL, and they were absolutely shocking,” recalls McMahon. “They have the rugby tackle in the AFL, which is the main way of tackling. It was very difficult for them [to transfer that to hurling and football]. They missed out on a lot of those cues. The fact is it was an Aussie company with a bit of insight from people over here – but I think a lot of that insight just came from the GAA [which had endorsed the releases]. They’re going ... ‘we can make a sports game’. But is it Gaelic football?”All we football and hurling fans really want is a game where you can punt the ball up the pitch, step past a tackle and swing a point over the bar. Is that too much for hope for?It’s a shame Sony didn’t follow up on these games. Had they done so, they would surely have got incrementally better. Just look at franchises such as Madden, for the NFL, and FC (Fifa until 2023), which were initially atrocious and took decades to become halfway playable. That, indeed, is the story of sports sims in general – a genre that has risen from the humblest of beginnings. Those of us ancient enough to recall the glory days of the ZX Spectrum, for instance, will remember the trauma of playing Jon Ritman’s Match Day, where the ball would stick to a player’s foot as if attached by glue. Worse yet, the jerseys changed colour depending on how closely you stood to the opposition while comedy goalkeepers made a conscious effort to jump out of the way of your strike. The old Gaelic Games: Hurling PS2 game from the noughties - which people now remember fondly despite its many flaws. It was wooden and joyless – and while that is probably enough for plastic Arsenal fans, for the rest of us, the game was essentially an endurance test. That was likewise the situation with the early Fifa games – though there was the comedy bonus in the 1994 edition of Fifa of being able to escape a yellow card by running away from the ref. These games were ridiculous and often barely connected to soccer. But they were fun – something that the mid-2000s GAA games got semi-right (if largely thanks to Ó Muircheartaigh and his half-time banana).“That’s why we have so many football games – thousands of them in fact,” writes Richard Moss in the introduction to his book: A Tale of Two Halves – The History of Football Video Games. “They seek to replicate something of the magic of the beautiful game, some looking to its perversions, others to its joyousness, others still to its nuance. There is no one perfect football game, just as there is no one perfect football team or player or goal. We can celebrate those imperfections and the small triumphs they make.” Some of the best soccer sims came at the sport from a quirky angle – Sensible Soccer for instance was a trigger-happy arcade game first, sports simulation second. It also had a sense of humour – as evidenced by touches such as the option to lead a “Dead Rockstar XI” on to the pitch. Their shirts were all black, Ian Curtis of Joy Division was between the sticks and Jimi Hendrix was the goal-getter supreme. Best of all was Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer – a gung-ho yin to the yang that was EA Sports Fifa series (rebadged as “FC” after EA and Fifa went their separate ways). Pro Evolution was Fifa’s more exuberant cousin once removed: it didn’t have the fancy official team licences but it was fast-paced, easy to get into, hard to master – and a big influence on Gaelic Football Laochra, says McMahon.Some of the action from the new Gaelic Football Laochra game. “We have to make the game fun. One of the things people keep picking up on in some of the videos we put out – oh, he’s taking six steps. Well if we made them take four steps, it breaks up the flow. It breaks the immersion. We have to balance realism with fun. We aim to make it feel fun in the first place.”As with Pro Evolution, Gaelic Football Laochra has no official endorsement. There were exploratory talks with the GAA but Buck Eejit felt its resources were better directed into finishing the game. “We had discussions with the GAA. We thought we had something we would have been able to run with it. It’s just a bit of a logistical nightmare. There’s so many different stakeholders that need to give signoffs,” he says. “There’s the GAA, the county boards, the players. We still remain open to the conversation afterwards, to see if there is anything we can do going forward.” After all that, is the game any good? Well, it tries – you have to give it that. But it suffers from the same weakness as those old Sony titles – in that it is challenging to play and in the end just a grind. All we football and hurling fans really want is a game where you can punt the ball up the pitch, step past a tackle and swing a point over the bar. Is that too much for hope for? Apparently so. In Gaelic Football Laochra, passing is almost impossible. The opposing players are able to neutralise your kick simply by hovering in your proximity. And kickouts – the building blocks of any attack – are a chore insofar as the opposing team can seemingly bend time and space and intercept your kicks while your own players run in the opposite direction. Despite spending many hours with the game, I couldn’t get into it and ended up requesting a refund. Laochra is a heroic attempt but it ultimately flatters to deceive. The long wait for a proper GAA video game continues. IN THIS SECTION