A SENSIBLE CHAT (Part 1)
Jon dreams up his next game with a hookah!
Despite their typically modest name,
Sensible Software have long been
recognized as one of the most original
and successful programming teams
around. Games such as Wizball, MicroProse Soccer, and Parallax are C64
classics.
While The Shoot-'em-up
Construction Kit (SEUCK) is one of the
few game designers to work well, and
the only one to work brilliantly. Sensi
(as they're known to their friends) are to
the C64, what Ultimate used to be to the
Speccy.
Robin Hogg undertook the five hour
haul to the hamlet of March in East
Anglia, to have an expenses-paid five
course meal with 'jovial' Jon Hare
(graphic genius) and 'cuddly' Chris
Yates (programming prodigy). Between
burps and slurps their glittering careers
were reviewed, and the future previewed.
Finding March in March
was surprisingly challenging : zooming
around East Anglia in a Peugeot 205
revealed more mazes than
Parallax. But once there I was
soon being ushered into the
'legendary' Griffen hotel for a
scrumptious meal, with
prime steaks all round. As we
waited for our starters Jon
spilled the beans on their his-
tory.
'Sensi Software officially
started up four years ago, but
before that in 1985, Chris
worked on the Speccy conversion of the C64 oldie Gandalf.
It was jokingly titled
Sodov the Sorceror [work it
out] and the name alone
assured the game's moment
of success before disappearing into obscurity. Chris did
most of the graphics and I
helped him out while working on a college course doing
nothing — the usual!.'
'I knew Jon from the fifth
year of school,' interrupted
Chris. 'We formed a band
with two other people —
'band' in the gravest sense of
the word! I played rhythm
guitar brilliantly (of course)
and Jon sang — unfortunately
- and played lead guitar. We
were playing '70s freaky rock
music but a bit more enjoyable, sort of like Pink Floyd.
The band was Touchstone
and we played around the
Essex area, but distance
forced us to split up about a
year ago.
After work on Sodov Sensi
did a stint for System 3, doing
a few graphic screens for
International Karate
although Archer Maclean
redid them so it was a waste
of time. At the time we were
working through middle
men, LC Software, one of
whom was to become a
woman! It's weird but a few
years ago we found out that
the boss had had a sex
change! He was Mike before
and now he's a Patricia! He
could have been called
Michaela or something! Very
weird!'
The bit-part work continued with static screens for
Spectrum Skyfox, the forgettable Flyerfox, and Lone Wolf
In The Ice Halls of Terror -
'part two of the Lone Wolf
series which never came out'.
They also did Twister (no
nothing to with the very silly
'board' game for contortionists but the notorious
Twister: Mother of Harlots
promoted by lingerie-clad
dancing girls!). 'We wrote
and developed the program,
did everything in fact and
then Mark Cale put his name
to it, although he actually just
sorted out the deal for us,'
Jon commented.
'Years back Mark had the
storyboard for The Last
Ninja,' said Chris, 'he asked
Jon to do some static screens
and graphics for it.'
'But I didn't do anything!'
Jon concluded, raising
interesting questions about
what might have been if
Ninja had been a Sensi product.
Eventually Jon and Chris
heard about a government
small business scheme and
officially set up Sensible Software in 1986. 'We thought
that at least rather than get
ripped off by middle men
we'd get ripped off a bit less
in our own company!'
remarked Chris. They'd also
suffered with some awkward
software houses. 'We did a
conversion of Runestone in
two weeks, didn't get any
money for it though - Firebird
said it was too slow. It's
funny but it was their loader
that slowed it down! They
tried to change it but it didn't
work and never got published in the end!'
Galax-i-birds was the first
Sensible Software Inc. game,
a unique reworking of Galaxians
with such comic baddies as dodos, budgies, old
IK+ characters, and even a
few balls from Bounder.
Galax-i-birds was eventually
released by Firebird in
August '86. In the ZZAP!
review Julian Rignall said,
'To be honest, this game is a
load of rubbish, but it's enjoyable rubbish . . .
graphics are poor, sound is awful, but I
love it!'
Amazingly Sensi jumped
straight from this jokey
budget game to Parallax, the
astonishingly well programmed Sizzler which eventually
appeared on ZZAP! 45's
megatape. Asked about the
inspiration for the game,
Chris said, 'We both saw a
coin-op with parallax scrolling, which I can't remember
the name of. When we took
Parallax to Ocean they took
one look and signed us up. Six
months of toil was rewarded
with its release in October of
'86.'
And what of the planned
sequel?
'We had always planned to
do sequels to all our games.
Before, it was just a matter of
finding the time but now I
can't see it happening, we're
going to move onto other
things.'
But if, for example, Ocean
paid them lots of money to do
Parallax 2, would they?
'Well, money isn't every-
thing! Nine months is a long
time to be tied up in any game
for us, and we don't want to
be left behind [in the advance
of software and hardware
technology]. We'd have to
see.'
Their next game was even
more amazing, the Sensi
piece de resistance — the
utterly brilliant Wizball,
which took about nine
months to develop. What
made them write it?
'Oh man!!' responded
Chris. 'Er, well, we wanted a
good game with all the best
elements of our favourite
arcade games. We played
Dropzone for four months
solid, the Nemesis and Salamander coin-ops as well. We
kept going into the arcades
and seeing more and more
games. Wizball took nine
months, a pregnancy! The
same time to spawn a
game!!'
Luckily for the C64 gaming
world Wizball was no phantom pregnancy and became
the cover game for July '87
with a Sizzler to boot, even
though it reached the now
Gold Medal status of 96%.
I blatantly enquired how
much they made for Wizball?
'£1.50!' came the less than
serious reply! Were they still
receiving royalties?
'I wish we were!' both
cried in unison! The news
that Wizball was being converted to the Nintendo NES
brought a dark cloud of disappointment and frustration
over the proceedings — the
thought of millions of sales
flashed before them and and [sic]
not a yen coming their way.
Obviously they hadn't
realised it was going to be
such a massive hit?
The fruits of success - Chris's beloved Lotus Esprit.
'After Parallax we took
Wizball to Ocean and signed
up with them. They more or
less said that they weren't
planning for any other format
releases and they doubted it
was going to sell that well.
That's one reason I guess
why Ocean are as big as they
are, they're very shrewd with
a better business sense than
us! We certainly didn't know
how successful it would be,
we just wrote a game that we
thought was good; one that
we'd want to play ourselves.'
Their next project would
allow thousands of other
people to do something similar: The Shoot-'Em-Up Construction Kit for Palace,
released in December '87.
'SEUCK started off as a series
of graphic code utilities written by Chris, which was
expanded into a construction
kit.'
After two hits for Ocean
why did they go to Palace?
The money?
'No, actually we knew
Matthew Timms there, a
good friend of ours who's
now at Domark. Also Palace
are a very honest company,
one of the most reliable
around [sic .']
'SEUCK was turned around
in six months which was
pretty intensive for us with
quite a lot of work crammed
in.' But it paid off with a Gold
Medal, if ultimately no rating!
What of a horizontal scroller version of SEUCK a la
Nemesis, complete with
'multiple' weapons and all
that? A SEUCK 2 perhaps?
'I don't know, maybe. If we
did one it would be a lot more
flexible with a lot of the boring bits taken out, put in lots
of graphic libraries, in fact it
would be totally rewritten.'
As it happens Palace are certainly interested in a sequel,
but nothing is settled as yet
with any release date at least
a year away.[sic ']
And what did Sensi Soft
think of Amiga SEUCK?
'I was slightly disappointed by it.' admitted
Chris.'The scrolling was a little on the slow side but we'll
definitely improve on it a lot
with SEUCK 2!'
With SEUCK under their
belt, the royalties started to
flood in and Jon splashed out
on a BMW 535i. while Chris
succumbed to the classic
programmer temptation and
got a Lotus, followed by a
Porsche and — currently — a
very sporty red Lotus Esprit.
Incidentally the Porsche was
sold to Martin Galway, the
nephew of the famous
flautist and a first-class freelance musician who was
briefly a part of Sensi.
The offbeat blast-'em
budget game Oh No! pro-
vided light relief after the
rigours of SEUCK. This was
their only '88 release as the
company began to work with
Origin, the US RPG specialists who recently won a Gold
Medal for Space Rogue. Sensi
embarked on a massive RPG
adventure titled Touchstone
(remember the band?). 'For
two years we had been working on the gameplay and
story for Touchstone, a traditional storyline fantasy RPG
but with a twist in it. It
became so big and very intricate. We originally wanted
the player to be able to
approach the game through
one of the many plots and
sub-plots.[sic ']
'Origin decided that the
American market (that it was
primarily aimed at) was
changing towards the Nintendo consoles. There was no
deadline as such but admittedly we weren't making
much progress. Origin are
good to work with and it was
an amicable decision to stop
the project in November of
last year. The project is now
dead but we still hold the
copyright and we'd dearly
love to see it come to life. The
good thing about it is that it's
adaptable. As we've worked
on the story for eighteen
months, and the gameplay
for six months, it can be a text
adventure, a Cinemaware-style game, even an arcade
adventure, whatever - a
game to suit the client.' As
yet there's no word on any
interested software house.
Fingers crossed though.
Thankfully their next project suffered no such delays.
And in early '89 Jon and Chris
rocketed to the top of the 64
programmers league with
Sensi-Soccer, otherwise
known as the classic MicroProse Soccer. After the likes
of Wizball why a Soccer
game?
'To tell the truth, there
were no good football games
around. We'd seen Match
Day 2 and that was alright
but we wanted to do a game
that we could play, a fun
game. It took five months to
write, not long but it took a
long time to get the cheques
through for it! Writs were
involved to get the money out
of MicroProse and with the
departure of a certain person
(no names!) from the company we finally received a
large cheque. It was very
frustrating as we had a lot of
bills.' Why did they go to MicroProse, the war sim
specialists?
'Well, there was no problem getting people to see the
game, we advertised in all the
mags as you may remember
and got loads of phone calls.'
MicroProse obviously
offered the best deal, and surprisingly Ocean weren't all
that interested enquiring
through a third party but not
pursuing the game any
further; obviously they
thought two football games
would have been too much.
But as it turned out, even a
year on MicroProse Soccer is
still by far and away the best
C64 footie game, beating all
the new licence-based
releases into the ground. 'In
fact, SEUCK wasn't the
biggest seller for us, Soccer
was. We're still getting good
royalties for it.'
However, they were disappointed with the 16-bit conversions by the Electric Pencilcil Company (Zoids, Fourth
Protocol etc). 'Kick Off probably cost us a lot of money as it
was released at the same
time, although the 64 version
was a pile of crap! [Well, he's
honest!] We're not millionaires but we've made
other people millionaires!'
'The MicroProse Soccer
sequel is coming soon in time
for the World Cup rush but
it's nothing to do with us. Fortunately it's now being called
World Cup Soccer or something like that instead of
MicroProse Soccer 2. Not that
there's a lot we could have
done about it if it was called
MicroProse Soccer 2!'
Their most recent release
was of course Insects In
Space, my favourite game on
the superb, Sizzling Fourth
Dimension compilation from
Hewson. 'We knocked up
Insects in two months over
Xmas '88, we showed it to
every budget house under
the sun but no-one wanted to
know. Eventually Hewson
took it, but it was a bit weird
as Hewson paid for the game
and it never came out (until
now). It was planned for their
budget label (Rack-it) but
they stopped all that shortly
after.'
And what on the Rhineland
possessed them to write
Insects?
'It was a bit of fun! Just a
bit of a laugh! St Helen Bak,
stupid name!'
And the risque sprite with
the big boobies?
'They could have been
warts!' Errh, sure!
After lunch, in the 'temporary' Sensible Software den
(Chris's house) I was shown
the new tennis game that the
duo have been working of for
a year now. Planned for a midyear release. Palace are
currently finalising the title,
which they hope to get a big
licence for. And after that?
'I dunno,' Chris shrugged,
maybe we'll have a few
months research and
development first, we've
already got the basic idea for
a new game . . .'
WHAT'S THE RACQUET
We'll do a proper preview on the tennis game next month,
but for now I can tell you it's an unofficcial
follow-up to MicroProse Soccer with one- or two-player
tennis action around the world.
THE SENSIBLE HITS
Galax-i-birds |
17 (Sep 1986) |
60% |
Parallax |
18 (Oct 1986) |
93% |
Wizball |
27 (Jul 1987) |
96% |
SEUCK |
32 (Dec 1987) |
N/A |
Oh No! |
38 (Jun 1988) |
80% |
MicroProse Soccer |
59 (Mar 1990) |
90% |
Insects in Space |
59 (Mar 1990) |
94% |
Instead of a look-down viewpoint a la Passing Shot with
sprites, the game employs superbly animated vector graphic
players with triangular heads,
which move surprisingly fast.
Palace's Richard Joseph has
come up with a maddeningly
catchy rendition of the Wimbledon title music, but to know
more you'll have to wait until
next month. Rest assured it's
going to be a typically Sensible
game in its own Sensible way!
But in the meantime I had one
last question for Sensi: were
they going to take on the new
technology and abandon the
C64 like others have?'
'Well, funnily enough we were
going to go on about how the
C64 is dead and all that malarky
but when you think about the
sales of the C64 and the
Amiga. . . We're going to be
continuing for some time yet
(with the C64). The Amigas are
pretty good in their own way but
the 64 is still good. When parents go into the shops, they
don't look at the computers,
their hardware specifications
and all that, they just look at the
price.'
Our thoughts exactly, but
what of the mythical C64 console?
'It's a very interesting idea but
they'd have to get the price right
and of course there's the Nintendo to compete with.'
What came as a surprise to me
was the fact that the Sensible
Software team don't get to play
games that much, particularly
their own!! 'We simply don't
have the time.' came the joint
reply. Chris confessed to playing
Pinball Wizard on the Amiga
(the name of the publisher
escapes us all at the time) and
also MicroStyle's Stunt Car
Racer.
'Stunt Car Racer was good,
too good in fact, we had to
destroy the disk! There's something about the game that holds
the attention, even if you complete the practice courses you
still want to play through the
game - in fact the computer was
too good! That's what we want
to incorporate in our games, for
the computer to make mistakes.'
A sort of Artificial Intelligence?
'Yes.' enthused Chris. Actually, if anybody can show a flair
for programming and game
design then come to us. . .
'Yes, come to us,' Jon interrupted, 'if you're young and
want to be exploited!!'
Doesn't sound all that Sensible to me, Jon!
This feature was typed in/OCRed by Iain
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