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'I can't spake!'
Image: PDCSign in to your Polygon account
Darts is an immensely popular pub game — or sport, depending on who you ask — all over the world. An estimated 17 million Americans play as of 2019, and it's allegedly the "fastest growing sport in the UK." We're in the middle of the 2026 PDC World Darts Championship right now, too, which sees over 100,000 people attend over the course of the three-week event. Starting next year, that will increase to more than 180,000 due to a venue change within Alexandra Palace, aka the iconic Ally Pally, in London.
Incredible stories are told every year, such as the iconic "they're both on nines!" commentary from Wayne Mardle during the 2023 Michael Smith vs. Michael Van Gerwen duel, Luke Littler's meteoric run to the final when he burst onto the scene in 2024, or Phil Taylor's likely-never-to-be-beaten record of 14 world titles to his name. There are also plenty of cult heroes: Just this year, fan-favorites have been made of David Munyua, Mitsuhiko Tatsunami, and Motomu Sakai, to name a few, for their underdog performances and charismatic behavior during walk-ons, celebrations, and mid-game.
All of this is to say darts is big, but in the video game world? These days, it's often relegated to a minigame, such as in Final Fantasy VII Remake, where it shows up at the Seventh Heaven bar. In Watch Dogs: Legion, you can play at various pubs around London as a means to recruit civilians to DedSec, and similarly, you can challenge some NPCs in pubs in both Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5. Persona 5 Royal even grants combat benefits if you play darts during your downtime.
Perhaps the best game to introduce darts as a small part of its offering is Yakuza 6. The 12th substory in the action game introduces Paul Lim, a real darts player from Singapore and a name everyone who watches the world championship is familiar with, as he was the first person to ever throw a nine-darter (the sport's hardest challenge) at the event, back when it was run by the BDO, not the PDC. At 71 years old, he's made it to this year's tournament yet again, for his 15th appearance, and he plays himself in the game. Even though it's soft tip darts, rather than the more popular steel tip, it's brilliant representation of a longtime pro.
It hasn't always been this way though. In 1981, Darts was released for the Atari 8-bit, where the player competed against a computer-controlled opponent with ten difficulty levels at the traditional “X01” format. A different game of the same name was released four years later for the BBC Micro, introducing “round the board” and “cricket” modes. Rather than just aiming and 'throwing' at the board though, the cursor in both games would move around erratically to artificially add challenge, as otherwise, it would be far too easy.
A few more darts games were released in the late '80s — 180, Pub Darts, and PC Darts — but it wasn't until 1989 when they bridged the casual enticement of the pub game with the high level sporting prowess of some of the greats. That year, both Jocky Wilson's Darts Challenge and John Lowe's Ultimate Darts had pro players attach their names to them, but the gameplay was largely the same, as was the sequel to the former in 1991, Jocky Wilson's Darts Compendium.
The next noteworthy darts game didn’t release until 1999: Elite Darts. Known as Raymond van Barneveld: Elite Darts in the Netherlands only, this is another game with pro player attachment (who, fun fact, is still competing today; he’s ranked 35th in the world). A Windows PC exclusive, Elite Darts introduced motion-based controls, meaning if you moved your mouse either too fast or slow, you'd over or undershoot the board entirely.
Cast your mind back to the sixth console generation, and you may recall there was a huge saturation in sports games. The Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) saw a gap in the market and released the first ever “official” darts video game in PDC World Championship Darts for both PS2 and PC in 2006. This utilized a similar motion-based technique to throw as Elite Darts did, but as a PDC licensed game, it had a lot more to offer away from the board.
Ten pro players were included, such as Phil Taylor, Raymond van Barneveld, and Dennis Priestley. You could play in five official PDC tournaments, including the PDC World Grand Prix, which has the unique rule of being double in, which means players must start each leg with a double, while also finishing on one. There were also plenty of party modes, including cricket, killer, and shanghai.
It received a mixed reception from critics, with Eurogamer's Dan Whitehead calling it a "solid and carefully crafted game that takes aim at a very narrow niche and hits the bullseye more often than not," but also awarded it a 6/10 due to him not seeing the point in it, explaining it "feels like it's stuck on the wrong format" and how an on-screen version of darts can't replicate the "tactile feeling of actually throwing darts."
That didn't stop the PDC though, because just over a year later, PDC World Championship Darts 2008 was released, and Dan's wish came to fruition: this one was on the Wii, so true motion controls were possible. Six more pro players were added to the roster, and each player's throwing style and walk-ons were motion captured, making for a far more authentic experience. You could even change the weight of the darts you threw with, which is a crucial aspect of the game in real life. Believe it or not, there's a huge difference between a 20g dart and a 24g one, although I recently discovered from some friends who follow the sport more casually than I do, the fact players use different weights to one another isn't common knowledge.
Despite these improvements, the game was panned far more than its predecessor, with the Wii version receiving the highest Metacritic score of 51, and IGN calling it "complete and total crap." Not everyone was so scathing, as Official Nintendo Magazine UK described it as a "decent darts game," adding "the Wii Remote adds a certain degree of realism," but considered the atmosphere to be "more local pub than Ally Pally." Not what the devs for the official world championship game would have hoped for.
Two more official PDC World Championship Darts games followed in subsequent years — 2009 and Pro Tour — before darts' primary governing body took it as a sign to abandon the idea going forward. That's despite Pro Tour actually receiving some impressive scores critically, including a 7.5/10 from Gamespot.
Since then, standalone darts games have struggled, but it hasn't been for a lack of trying. Top Darts was a 2010 Sony-published game for the PS3 (and Vita, two years later) that was widely praised for its Move functionality, and Phil Taylor's Power Play Darts was a Nintendo DS exclusive that used the stylus intuitively to mimic throwing darts, but still struggled to get much attention.
We're in an era of video games now, though, where anyone can try their hand at development, so the last eight years or so, almost entirely on Steam, has seen a vast array of darts games come to fruition. The majority are basic attempts lacking in features, such as Darts Up and Back Alley Darts, but who can blame them? What can you actually add to make a darts video game appealing in this day and age, especially when the barrier to entry to play the real thing is already so low? You could grab a second-hand setup for extremely cheap, and all you need is a wall you don't mind potentially damaging as you learn the ropes.
Due to the sport's surge in popularity over the last couple of years — led mostly by Luke Littler's phenomenal rise at such a young age — being in the darts circles on social media means seeing posts like the one embedded above every now and then. And I get it. The general darts audience are also avid players of games such as EA Sports FC and Madden, both of which are more popular than ever and their flagship Ultimate Team modes bring in millions worth of revenue. Visualizing a pack opening followed by an iconic player performing their walk-on, such as Peter "Snakebite" Wright or Damon "The Heat" Heta, would be fantastic.
But for every person clamoring for the PDC to develop a new video game, there's someone in the replies explaining how it simply wouldn't work. "Surely it would just be 180 after 180 as soon as you sussed out the aiming," reckons one. "I've got the 3D version, it's called a dartboard and a set of darts," jokes another. It's tough to disagree, because it's very easy to foresee players figuring out exactly how to land a treble 20 with every dart within the first week of release, flooding YouTube with tutorials, and turning every match into a contest of who gets to throw first and therefore land a nine-darter — the sport's hardest challenge.
For a darts video game to work, it'd need to be deeper than that. Realism would need to be put to one side, with gameplay modifiers or over-the-top mechanics introduced, a la FIFA Street. Add combos and gamify the whole concept more, such as quadruple targets or power-ups that hinder your opponent. The only problem then is that it's unlikely the PDC would endorse it, as it would stray too far from the real sport and event.
On the other hand, and as suggested by darts content creator MatadorDarts, the game could follow a proper "road to pro" route. Albeit single player rather than multiplayer, you could create a player and start in pub competitions, followed by entering ADC Vault events (or equivalent), joining competitions like the Modus Super Series, entering Q-School, then eventually making your way to the World Championship. Almost Football Manager-like, if there was a way to manage sponsorships, branding, budgets, and media interviews — that would give it considerably more depth.
That said, if the gameplay isn't a bullseye, then it will never have lasting appeal, because the actual act of playing darts would be too repetitive. If there's a chance of this coming to fruition, though? Given the ascendent popularity of the sport, now is the perfect time for either the PDC to contract a big studio to develop something official, or a talented team of devs to give a darts game a proper go. You can bet I'll be there on day one.
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