Sensible Software

~ the obit ~

Sensible Software started in March 1986 in Chelmsford, Essex, run by Jon Hare and Chris Yates, who had been at school together. It stayed that size for its whole life. Through the entire 8-bit period and then the 16-bit one, it was one of the most commercially successful development teams in Europe while remaining a company you could describe by naming two people.

Wizball came in 1987 and is still the game other developers cite. Mega-Lo-Mania followed in 1991. Then Sensible Soccer in 1992, which is where the house style became a thesis: draw the players tiny and pull the camera up until the whole shape of the pitch is legible at once. Passing then reads like a diagram instead of a broadcast. Every other football game that year was trying to look like television.

Sensible World of Soccer in December 1994 pushed it into something else entirely. There were 1,500 clubs in it and 27,000 players, with a management layer sitting under the match engine, all of it on Amiga floppies. Amiga Power called it the best game ever made in 1996. In 2007 Stanford put it on a list of the ten most important video games ever, where it is the only one developed in Europe and the only sports game on the list.

Cannon Fodder had come out in December 1993, sold past a hundred thousand copies, and topped the charts for weeks. It is a war game played for laughs where every soldier has a name, and where the hill of graves behind the menu grows as your men die. That design decision is the whole argument of the thing and it is also what got the company into a fight it had not planned for.

The row over that game is the part of this story that does not survive the trip out of Britain. In November 1993 the box art put a poppy on it and a tabloid ran the game as an insult to the war dead. The Royal British Legion called it appalling and an MP called it monstrous. A poppy in Turkey is a flower. There is no version of that argument you can carry two borders and still have it land, and i have read the whole sequence twice and still file it as a fact about Britain rather than a fact about a game.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the poppy ~

The timing was what did it. The controversy landed right around 11 November 1993, which is the one day of the year that symbol is doing the most work in Britain, with the game due in shops the following month. Sensible had picked the poppy precisely because the game was anti-war, and the developers pointed at the named soldiers and the graves as the evidence. Nobody running the story was interested in that reading.

Both the game box and the cover of an issue of Amiga Power were changed. The title screen kept the poppy and added a line saying it was not endorsed by the Royal British Legion, which is a disclaimer with a small amount of anger in it. Then the game shipped and outsold nearly everything on the format, as banned-adjacent things generally do.

~ the day it died ~

Hare and Yates sold the company to Codemasters in May 1999 for a sum that was never disclosed. What actually changed hands was the source code and the name, because by then that was most of what the company physically consisted of. The listed end of operations is June 1999, so there is about a month of slack between the deal and the lights going off, and nobody has ever bothered to narrow it.

Hare kept working with Codemasters afterward and kept returning to the same two games, with a Sensible Soccer update in the middle of the next decade and Cannon Fodder resurfacing periodically since. The name survives as a label on other people's release schedules. The two men in Chelmsford who drew players four pixels tall stopped being a company at the point the Amiga scene they had grown up inside finished collapsing, which is not a coincidence and was not called out as the reason by anyone at the time.

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