Large red arrows, power gauges, and complex set-piece controls? Nope.

Searching the world for your next star player--almost as much fun as playing with them.

Sensible Trivia

The cocreator of Sensible Soccer, Jon Hare, has recently teamed up with John Phillips and Mike Montgomery from The Bitmap Brothers to form a development, design, and production company named Tower Studios. Games currently in development at the new London-based studio include mobile versions of both Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder.

Although best known for the Sensible Soccer series, Sensible Software (which was purchased by Codemasters in 1999) was responsible for numerous games that might be considered classics today. Examples include Wizkid, Parallax, Cannon Fodder, MegaLoMania, and Sensible Golf.

Jon Hare was the creator of a never-released adult game titled Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. The adventure game, which was approximately 75 percent complete when development was halted after three years, would have seen players assuming the role of an up-and-coming rock star.

Our very own Justin Calvert appears as a player in Sensible Soccer '98. In the custom teams section you'll find him playing in the black and white vertically striped uniform of the Rapide XI team--along with a number of his coworkers from that time.

Only four minutes into the match, and already a scoring opportunity.

My weapon of choice, the Competition Pro 5000.

Sensible World of Soccer (SWOS) was the first soccer game to combine excellent on-the-pitch gameplay with what, in 1994, seemed like some pretty in-depth management simulation. For the most part, your career mode management decisions were limited to match tactics and wheeling and dealing on a transfer market that included no fewer than 26,000 players from around the world--as you attempted to mold whichever of the 1,500 or so club teams you'd chosen to manage into the best in the world. The real goal of the game, though, was to prove yourself so convincingly as a club manager that you were offered a job with a national squad.

One of the great things about the players in SWOS, which all featured attributes based on their real-life counterparts, was that when you signed a star player and took him onto the turf for the first time, you knew that your money had been well spent. Although not entirely realistic, the fact that star players were invariably a lot faster than anyone else and enjoyed superior ball control meant that you could do some really great things with them, and adding just one such player to an otherwise mediocre squad could turn around your team's results instantly. Players' values would change in line with their performances too, and it generally wasn't difficult to maintain a healthy bank balance if you were willing to sell players that other clubs were eager to sign.

On the pitch, SWOS refined the already incredible and intuitive gameplay that had made the Sensible Soccer series a firm favorite with gamers who would otherwise have been spending their time with the likes of Kick-Off or Goal! The series' trademark tiny players were surprisingly well animated, and, because of their diminutive size, you were able to see a significant portion of the pitch at all times. Using only a single-button joystick, SWOS allowed you to perform sliding tackles, flying headers, accurate passes, long balls, banana shots, and even goalkeeper-lobbing efforts from the halfway line. There were no complex controls for on-the-ball tricks, no big red arrows when taking free-kicks or corners, and definitely no flashy shots of photo-realistic players arguing with each other after fouls. SWOS players were only a handful of pixels high, but to this day only Konami's Winning Eleven series has offered a more pleasing version of the beautiful game.

When the first Sensible World of Soccer game was released in 1994 I was working three jobs--my mornings were spent answering phones and doing data entry at a haulage company, my afternoons were spent at a supermarket checkout, and by night I was working as a barman at a local holiday camp. There was always time for "SWOS" though, and the sole perk of my morning job was that I could use the computer there to print out spreadsheets detailing the performances and changing cash values of every single player that had ever been a part of my team. By the time I got my first job at a UK PlayStation magazine in 1996, I'd devoted more hours than I care to remember to the Euro '96 and 96/97 editions of SWOS, which followed the original game. And, despite the fact that my new job gave me access to advance copies of games like Tekken 2 and Tomb Raider, my colleagues and I always made time for monthly SWOS tournaments on the beaten-up Amiga that sat in the corner of the office. Maybe one day I'll get my Amiga shipped over from the UK and set it up in the GameSpot arcade.