New Star Games

New Star Games is a British independent developer that specialises in sports games with role-playing mechanics underneath them. It was founded by Simon Read in 2003 and incorporated in 2006, which makes it older than most of the studios its games get compared to.

The through-line across two decades is the same idea: keep the on-field action simple enough to play with one thumb, and put the depth in everything surrounding it — contracts, morale, development, the slow business of building a squad.

New Star Soccer arrived in 2003 and set the template. You play one footballer rather than a whole team, take the shots and passes that matter, and spend the rest of your time managing a career around them.

Retro Bowl reuses that structure with American football and a coach's chair instead of a player's boots. If the mix of arcade moments and management busywork feels unusually well-judged, it is because the studio had already spent years tuning it.

Retro Bowl launched in 2020 and became, at its peak, the most downloaded game on the Apple App Store. It is the studio's widest-reaching release by a distance, and the reason most people arrive at this site.

Retro Bowl College followed in 2023, moving the same engine to the college game, where recruiting and prestige replace the salary cap as the thing that constrains you. There is a separate piece on this site comparing the two if you are deciding which to start with.