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!”
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 on the box. “It was very heavily influenced by ,” Jon admits, referring to the 1985 Japanese coin-op with a top-down perspective. “A lot of our Commodore 64-era the extreme ball-bending was inspired by . I later read that was a bug in , 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 .”
