Retro Gamer talks the creator of one of the Amiga's most fondly remembered titles

Sensible Software's infatuation with digital footy didn't start with Sensible Soccer. In the Eighties, Jon Hare and Chris Yates became addicted to trackball-operated Tehkan World Cup (“A game that hurt if you wore a ring on your hand,” according to Jon), which directly influenced C64 hit Microprose Soccer, lauded at the time as “the best football game ever produced” by C&VG.

Fast-forward a few years and the Sensible Software team was hard at work on Mega Lo Mania, squeezing in umpteen games of Kick Off 2 during coffee breaks. “We were getting irritated with some bugs in the game, and there were problems with it we didn’t like, although that was only because we’d played it a hell of a lot,” begins Jon. “While doing a lot of late night sessions on Mega Lo Mania, we started thinking about creating a football game. The very first Sensible Soccer men were the Mega Lo Mania guys dressed in football kits. By the time Mega Lo Mania was done, I’d mocked up a pitch, and we had a perspective and look to go on. Chris Chapman then knocked up some controls and we got going with it.”

Jon admits that some aspects of Sensible Soccer (Sensi hereafter) were inspired by other games, “There’s the overhead view from Mega Lo Mania, and the pace of the game probably came from Kick Off, which is quite fast.” However, the key element of the game is how it feels to play, and this is reliant on two components: the controls and the player selection. “If you look at the controls of Sensi, they’re pretty bloody simple,” says Jon, adding that it enables gamers to get stuck in straight away. “You move a guy around with the ball, and you can pass it with a tap of the button, or hold the button down to kick it in the air. So there’s some innovation with the short or long press, but your bloke basically kicks it in the direction he’s facing.”

Where Sensi really comes into its own, Jon argues, is in the way the players are selected, “That, for me, is the game’s biggest innovation, and it’s the most invisible part of the game.” According to Jon, the game always tries to key players up to be the next player on the ball, and it reads from the direction you’re pressing on the joystick which player you’re drawing on. “In other words, it running which player you want to run on to the ball,” clarifies Jon. “This is the most innovative and complicated part of Sensi, and it’s the best bit, too.”

Strangely, it’s partly down to Sensi’s somewhat basic aesthetic that the controls work so well. “The fact that our animation is extremely simple means the player’s imagination has to fill in the holes, but it enabled us to create very responsive controls; everything runs on the frame,” explains Jon. For him, many subsequent titles that don’t do this are problematic, “For example, FIFA went backwards because it was too slow, not running on the frame.” Although some modern-day critics suggest that Sensi suffers in terms of realism because of its simple graphics (see Keeping It Real boxout, for more of Jon’s thoughts on this subject), Jon argues that Sensi should be thought of in a more iconic fashion.

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A Sensible Accolade

In March 2007, Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, with academic researcher Matteo Bittanti, games journalist Christopher Grant and game designers Steve Meretzky and Warren Spector, formulated the ‘ten most important videogames of all time’, presenting the list at the Game Developers Conference. Sensible World Of Soccer made the list, alongside such gaming giants as Tetris, Warcraft, Doom and Civilization. “That is the biggest accolade I think any of our games has ever received, and it’s also the biggest accolade I’ve ever had professionally,” says Jon. “I mean, this is about the ten most important games of all time. Also, Sensi’s from the only European developer on the list – aside, perhaps, from Tetris, which is Russian – and it’s the only sports title and the most modern game there.” Certainly, it makes the CU ‘Screenstar’ seem somewhat insignificant.