Actua Sports is a sports video game series published by Gremlin Interactive which competed with Electronic Arts EA Sports label during the second half of the 1990s, until Gremlin was acquired by Infogrames. The term "Actua" is a (seemingly marketing-related) play on Sega's line of "Virtua" titled games, which included Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing and Virtua Striker. The first game in the series was the 1995 milestone title, Actua Soccer, which quickly became one of the most important titles for the company. It was later joined by the rebirth of the Premier Manager franchise and the club version of Actua Soccer. In 1996, the first non-football game was released, Actua Golf, followed by the sequels Actua Soccer 2 in 1997, now endorsed by English international Alan Shearer and Premier Manager 98. The third installment in the Actua Soccer series and the Ninety-Nine edition of Premier Manager followed in 1998, the year a new title debuted in the series: Actua Ice Hockey, the official video game of the Nagano Olympic Games ice hockey tournament, followed by Actua Tennis in the same year. After Gremlin was acquired by Infogrames, the series went into dormancy. The now-named Infogrames Sheffield House continued to develop sports games which functioned as successors to the Actua Sports games: PGA European Tour Golf, UEFA Challenge and Slam Tennis, which were all published by Infogrames in 1999–2000, 2001 and 2002 respectively, with Premier Manager 2000 releasing in April 2000. In 2003, following the closure of Infogrames Sheffield House, many of the ex-Gremlin assets were sold by the now-named Atari to Zoo Digital Publishing, who re-released a majority of the titles on the PlayStation and PC in Late-2003 under the "Zoo Classics" budget range. Titles Actua Soccer (1995) The first title's biggest claim to fame was its full 3D graphics engine, used for the first time in a home console football game (the first full-3D football game being Sega arcade Virtua Striker); although other console games had used a 3D field, players were commonly still 2D sprites but in Actua Soccer players were polygonal. The game was developed with close ties to a local football club Sheffield Wednesday: their players provided hints to the programmers, and three players, Chris Woods, Graham Hyde and Andy Sinton, also served as motion capture models.<ref>{{cite web|title=Actua Soccer History" Actua Soccer History|url=http://www.actuasoccerworld.com/html/history.html|first=Aarud|last=Thomas|date=2005-01-01|accessdate=2009-01-28|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20070820180537/http://www.actuasoccerworld.com/html/history.html|archivedate=2007-08-20|url-status=dead}}</ref>Actua Soccer featured only national teams, with squads of 22 players from each of