Allan Border’s Cricket (PC, 1993) - Review - Square Cuts and Square Pixels

Travel back to 1993 and load up a DOS prompt where the roar of the crowd is a single Sound-Blaster “thwock” and the MCG looks suspiciously like a green chessboard: Allan Border’s Cricket is waiting to turn your beige tower into a summer at the Gabba. Audiogenic’s cult hit lets you steer any of the nine Test nations—or one of six Sheffield Shield sides—through five-day marathons, one-day screamers, or the wonderfully chaotic two-innings-twenty-over hybrid, all under the silent yet menacing gaze of a psychic white square that tells you exactly where each delivery will pitch.
Batting is a split-second dance of timing eight classic strokes, bowling demands cursor placement followed by a nerve-wracking speed-and-spin bar, and fielding mostly handles itself until you decide to gamble on a relay throw that would make Jonty Rhodes wince.
Between overs you can quick-save (a godsend when a Test drags into real-world dawn), tinker with exhaustive team editors that let you rewrite batting averages to Bradman levels, or simply admire how the rain delay sprite art looks like animated static on an old CRT.

Beyond the scoreboard, the game is a fascinating snapshot of early-’90s licensing gymnastics: the same code shipped in Britain as Graham Gooch World Class Cricket and in South Africa as Jonty Rhodes II, all built by programmer Gary James Gray and wrapped in identical mechanics that still underpin modern cursor-based cricket sims.
What you won’t find are commentary reels or broadcast-style replays—just chunky sprites, Richie-Benaud dreams, and that Square daring you to nail the perfect cover drive. Fire up DOSBox, queue a soundtrack of cicadas and distant lawn mowers, and discover why a thirty-year-old sports sim still bowls gamers clean through the gate.