It was so, so easy for me to slip back into Sensible Soccer after years away. Muscle memory did much of the work of picking out tackles, moving the ball on quickly, curving passes. The strategy for the rest of the decisions barely took any longer to dredge up. It must be one of the games most indelibly imprinted on me. I can just about remember coming to it new, though, as a regular player of many other football games before it. A first match against Latvia ended in a heavy defeat and passed in an incomprehensible blur. It wasn’t that it felt like I hadn’t picked up the game’s requirements yet. It was that it felt like I had no way of even grasping what they might be. Sensible Soccer didn’t feel like any of those other games. Maybe that’s why it’s the one football game I’ve known several non-football fans to really enjoy.
Back at Speedball 2 I set out the alternatives to make football-based games work better than they had done before: 1) wait for time and technology to make lifelike simulations a bit more possible or 2) take a different gameplay approach to representing football. Sensible Soccer is solution 2 all the way. While other football games were trying to look like TV football coverage and to feel like a real match, and failing all round, Sensible Soccer opts out of that contest. It nominally has the rules of football present and correct, but rather than trying to make its footballers look like real people (though note that it is the first football game #1 so far to show Black players as Black), its footballers are tiny pixelly caricatures who look more like Lemmings, with a similar expressiveness to their miniature forms. And instead of the plodding and predictable version of football on offer elsewhere, it offers a 200mph abstract form of football which is, by a long distance, more fun.
As an illuminating example, let’s take the question of what happens when the other team has the ball. On the joysticks of home computers through into the ‘90s with their single buttons, the one button has to be for tackle, so there can’t be a button for switching which member of your team you control. As such, the game has to decide for you, and usually gives you at any time the player closest to the ball. If the defender you’re in charge of is already behind the attacker and has no chance of catching them up, tough luck. You have to wait until the attacker is closer to the defender you do want than the one you’re controlling. Running the one you have further away from the ball can make that happen quicker, of course. So, absurdly, that’s a good course of action. Except that you won’t get any warning when control switches over and will probably end up moving the player you do want in the wrong direction.
Sensible Soccer fixes none of that and works in exactly the same way. And yet, because it moves so much faster that the interaction described happens over a fraction of a second instead of two or three seconds, there is no time to process its shortcomings. And because its miniature footballers allow it to show so much more of the pitch at one time, you can plan ahead. Maybe the best-positioned defender is still a couple of players away from the attacker, but start moving the joystick in the direction they should go, and before you have time to blink they will be in front of the attacker and under your control. Just as importantly, that attacker will still be on much the same course, too, rather than being able to take advantage of any hesitation.
In contrast to the prevailing model of the ball sticking to the player with it, in Sensible Soccer any attempt to change direction without the utmost care results in the ball slipping away. Defenders can take it off you just by running into it, without even needing to tackle. Taking control of one attacker and weaving your way through the defence to score is suddenly no longer the obvious strategy. All the more so because to compensate for this lack of dribbling control, you get an impressive range of passing and shooting options: pull back and left as soon as you’ve pressed kick and the ball will go up and to the left; give the button a particularly short tap and the game will pick out a light pass towards your nearest teammate in that direction even if you’re not facing exactly their way.
You get very little opportunity to take action on the ball, then, but every hard-fought opportunity that you do get is a huge one. Sensible Soccer is a game of trying to pick smartly from a huge range of options under extreme time constraint, and trying to be ready to do the same again the next time you get a tenth of a second on the ball. It owes at least as much to table football or pinball as to the experience of playing professional football, and lining up a series of perfect pinpoint motions under all of that pressure and watching the ball fly into the goal is an exhilarating experience. Even if the form of football it offers is its own abstract thing, the intensity of competition and the resultant emotion feels more true to the best moments of the sport. If this is the alternative, who needs simulation?
Gallup Amiga chart, The One, August 1992
