THE JOYS OF SENSIBLE SOCCER CAN BE TRACKED ACROSS FOUR DECADES AND MORE THAN 10 RELEASES. RETRO GAMER JOINS JON HARE IN THE COMMENTARY BOX TO TRACE THE EVOLUTION OF THE SERIES, FROM FORERUNNER TO SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR
Subbuteo and soft toys were the true starting points for one of the most loved football series in the history of gaming. “As a child I loved Subbuteo,” Jon Hare recounts about the vintage tabletop football game. “My father and grandfather used to play it together in the pub. Every day I would set the Subbuteo up on the floor and ask my dad to play. Sometimes he would say yes but sometimes he would understandably be too tired after work. And the real premise for Sensible Soccer was to not make someone have to do that; to make it so they could have someone to play against any time they wanted. Even earlier than that, the first-ever game I designed was three teddies versus three rabbits with a ping-pong ball between two doors, getting in my mum’s way out in the hallway and making up little rules. Making football games has always been in me!”
MicroProse Soccer became the first computerised expression of that passion in 1988. The name was settled on as a compromise with the publisher, which steered the team away from their original intention to use Sensible Soccer on the box. “It was very heavily influenced by Tehkan World Cup,” Jon admits, referring to the 1985 Japanese coin-op with a top-down perspective. “A lot of our Commodore 64-era games were arcade influenced. In MicroProse Soccer the extreme ball-bending was inspired by Tehkan. I later read that was a bug in Tehkan, but we’d interpreted it as something we could put in! It contributed to the aftertouch control of the ball that then also made its way into Sensible Soccer.”
Another foundational pillar for the series was International 3D Tennis. Making a tennis sim gave Sensible valuable experience of taking a realworld calendar of sporting events and accurate sports data, and then reflecting that closely on computer screens. “That experience of taking a real world of sport and putting it directly into a game is something you can really see in Sensible Soccer,” Jon reflects, before also crediting Dino Dini’s overhead football classic Kick Off as having an impact around the same time. “Kick Off was rightly number one around then. Myself and [Sensible programmer] Chris Chapman really enjoyed it but we were also frustrated by certain aspects of the gameplay. MicroProse Soccer had preceded Kick Off by a year, so I think there was a kind of cyclical influence between our games.”
Bringing these different inspirations together, Sensible started working on a new
