| Sensi Feature in PC Zone Dec 2002 |
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| Sensi Feature in PC Zone Dec 2002 |
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Every month, PC Zone (the world's greatest games magazine), publishes a feature called "Games That Changed The World". The December 2002 issue focuses on our beloved Sensi:
Nine months. That's how long it took to make Sensible Soccer, from conception to glorious birth. Nowadays it takes nine months for a focus group to decide on the colour of the packaging. Equally impressive is the fact that the game was put together by a core team of just two people, a far cry from the roomfuls of faceless drones slaving away over the latest hollow graphical showpiece. Not to suggest that modern games are rubbish - some of them are great - but it's hard to think of more than a handful that will still be talked about in ten years' time.
A decade ago, the Amiga was king, and for football fans, Kick Off was the game of choice. That proved to be the case in the Saffron Walden offices of burgeoning developer, Sensible Software, as founder Jon Hare explains over a slew of lagers and posh kebabs.
"While we were making Megalomania, which was our first Amiga game, we were playing Kick Off all the time in the gaps, and it was wasting a lot of our time. It actually ended up on the train track outside our window at one stage. There were just so many frustrating bugs. It was a good game, but it was full of irritating things that pissed us off too much."
Their copy of Kick Off might have ended up crushed beneath the wheels of the 5.15 to Liverpool St, but it did at least inspire Sensible to try and better it. "I think it did," concedes Hare. "We had the little men from Megalomania, and basically we just dressed them up in football kits. The actual little men that people know from Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder and Sensible Golf, are from Megalomania."
Those little men that give the game its distinctive look are a world away from the motion-captured Beckhams and Owens of today's football games, but the primitive graphics masked an exquisitely playable game that could prove chronically addictive. Games that changed the world is an extravagant claim, but Hare admits that over-indulgence in Sensi may well have "cost people their degrees."
That's not as ludicrous as it sounds, as I actually found out to my cost. Chancing upon the game in my third year of university, I rapidly became hooked, with academia firmly relegated to a back seat. The countless hours invested in playing Sensi weren't completely wasted though. Having randomly managed to secure an interview at a PC magazine, on declaring Sensible Soccer to be my favourite game, I promptly bagged the job.
The original Amiga version of Sensible Soccer was embraced by the critics, and as Hare says: "It made a lot of money as well. The first one sold about 200,000 maybe. The whole thing, if you add them all together, about two million." Sensi did eventually migrate onto the PC, but in common with most aficionados, Hare believes that hte definitive version was "the last Amiga one because we'd refined it by then."
He's probably right, but Sensible World of Soccer '96/'97 on the PC is still a phenomenally playable game, as attested by the fact that I am writing these words with chafed thumbs, having played through an entire season in the name of research. Hare agrees: "That was a good game, a bit faster."
It also had a rudimentary but highly effective management option, and at the time SWOS provided something of an antidote to the more complex Championship Manager 2. It still remains one of the few games ot successfully combine arcade action with management, and one of the even fewer games worth downgrading your PC to play.
As well as being a great game, Sensible Soccer always had a sense of humour, as exemplified by the surreal custom teams, with club and player names supplanted by obscurely themed lists. Old Dear's Menu, for instance, which featured a player called A Nice Bit Of Fish (something that erstwhile Zoner Paul Mallinson admits to thinking about every few weeks, usually when he's in the chippy). It was certainly a unique approach.
"Absolutely," says Hare. "I had a lot of fun with those. I did the majority of them, Some of the guys in the office did some as well, but that Old Dear's Menu was one of mine. There may have been one or two that my kids did as well in the later versions, because we had so many to fill in and there were so many versions. We did Kebab Shop as well, I remember."
And Essex Girls?
"For some of those we'd be sitting in the office: 'I got two more teams left to do. What do you think?', 'What about Essex Girls?' and everyone in the office shouts out names and we'd just write them in, change their hair colour and off you go. These days, you can't really get away with that humour. But I don't think it was just us. I think we came from a time when everyone was doing their own thing and we just carried on doing it. It was part of what we were known for, so we could get away with it in the main."
Sensible Software was also known for filming its own comedy intro videos, including the one for SWOS. "It's just people having a bit of fun," says Hare. "There are several reasons why that works. Creatively, obviously it's more fun. Secondly, we created an identity for ourselves - so people know you and when you go to deal with publishers it's better. And also, it's cheaper, it's us just fannying around. We filmed it in Saffron Walden. We were sponsoring the club at the time. I've not seen it in ages, but it was a lot of fun making it."
Not content with making the games and filming the videos, Sensible also recorded its own music. As Hare argues: "It's cheap, you've got control over it, if it's wrong you redo it, you don't get someone saying you need �80,000 for a Robbie Williams track, and Robbie needs this and Robbie needs that and stuff. Although he's probably a very nice bloke, it's much easier and much more fun for us just to do our own stuff. It also makes more sense financially - at the time we were making a profit of 75 per cent every year. You don't get that anymore."
Having forged its reputation through defiantly 2D action, the end for the Sensible Soccer series was sounded by the advent of 3D graphics. In an attempt to move with the times, a pseudo-3D version was released - following several delays - in the form of Sensible Soccer '98. While still reasonably playable, it lacked the immediacy of classic Sensi, and in comparison to its 3D rivals, looked a shed. In fact, there was a day in the PC ZONE office when Jon Hare brought in a copy of the latest update at the same time as another bloke was demoing the newest incarnation of Actua Soccer. The gulf in looks was evident, and the respective titles seemed to be from different gaming eras. There was never another Sensible Soccer game made.
Hare admits: "I think what knocked it on the head was our attempt at 3D. Programming-wise, we never had the right people on it. In terms of gameplay, we had the guy who did the original one, but the actual 3D environment was never done properly. The animation wasn't good enough and it really, really restricted what you could do, and it made it look crap. Also we were caught because we didn't want to mess the gameplay around too much. It was fast, we didn't want to suddenly make a slower game for the sake of fancy animation, so we tried to work it around the gameplay to get a similar speed. Playability-wise, I don't think it's that bad a game. But it didn't look anything like it's opposition."
It's the classic top-down 2D frantic action for which Sensi will always be remembered though, and Hare cites the game as his favourite of the 31 he has worked on. But when did he last actually play it?
"I was out for a meal in Leamington Spa with some friends and I got talking to some people they knew about work. I said that I made games and mentioned Sensible Soccer, and they were like 'No! We've just been playing that on the SNES at home.' So afterwards they invited us over to their flat and we had a few drinks and they challenged me to Sensi Soccer. The first couple of games they were really nervous and I was winning, and then they realised that I hadn't played for a while, and I was never that good at the SNES version anyway, and they started beating me more heavily as the evening wore on. I was just amazed they were still playing the SNES version after all this time."
In keeping with the title of the piece, Jon Hare believes that Sensible Soccer really has had a global effect. "I'll tell you how it's changed the world in my view," he explains. "We set out to make a game which I think by the end had about 80 or 90 countries in it, and was played all over the world. I think we were the first game to put black players in, players with dark hair and blonde hair, to make it as real as it was. And it really pleased me that people everywhere play Sensible Soccer. You read the sites and there's people from Yugoslavia, Brazil, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the States... We took time to make a game for people from other countries when no-one was doing it, and we're still getting people that are grateful for that ten years later. And that's what's amazing, because it was about football fans around the world, and that's actually how it has come across, which is great. They've got things like the Hungarian Sensible Soccer Championship and stuff, which is brilliant. For me, it's brilliant, I love it."
There are occasional rumblings of a GameBoy Advance conversion, but Hare has no intentions of ever making another full-blown Sensi. As he says: "We just about got away with the 3D version, to do it again would be a huge mistake. I'd rather make less money out of it and have it as a gaming icon."
It's unlikely we'll ever see another topdown football game, so it looks like we're stuck with FIFA for the meantime
What's next - at least for the PC - is probably regular updates of FIFA until the end of time. Hare says: "I think they're getting better. But I played one about two years ago, I think I was Arsenal versus Barcelona, and I was winning 5-0 - the first game I ever played - at half time, and they equalised and made it 5-5, and I thought there's got to be some rigging going on here."
In common with anyone who knows anything about football games, Hare is a big advocate of the PS2 game Pro Evolution Soccer: "It's a great game. It is a fantastic game. It's not as fast, I don't like the shooting, it hasn't got that feeling of really aiming that Sensible Soccer had. But it is a great game and it's the only football game I've played that's better than Sensible Soccer overall."
As for the future?
"It depends on what people want. The key to it is controlling the animation, making the animation follow what you tell it to do rather than having the animation dictate to you - having no restrictions. Ten years ago, when working on the Amiga, we had total control of everything, it's actually gone backwards today. Now we're still not up to where we were ten years ago in terms of speed of controllers interacting with graphics. The fact that people are still talking about Sensible Soccer proves that graphics are not everything. Gameplay is everything in a game."
The above article was written by Steve Hill, a man who is to be respected for his love of both Sensi and Championship Manager.
A quick note to anyone from PC Zone reading this: Sorry for lifting an article from your esteemed magazine - I think you'll agree that the pain I endured to type this entire article out myself is far greater than any punishment you could inflict on me for using it without your permission, and shows me to be a true Sensi disciple, so please don't do anything silly like call the police.