Designing Football Games for the World: An Interview with the Creator of Sensible Soccer

When Jon Hare, the visionary behind the iconic Sensible Soccer, first stepped into the world of game development, he never imagined his creation would influence an entire generation of football fans. What started in the late '80s with the MicroProse Soccer on the Commodore 64 quickly evolved into a game that transcended its time, blending accessible gameplay with an unmatched global reach. As Hare continues to shape the future of football gaming with Sociable Soccer, he reflects on the game design philosophy, the challenges of securing licenses, and the magic that made Sensible Soccer one of the most beloved games in history. In this interview, Hare shares his journey from the early days of gaming to his current work on Sociable Soccer, giving fans an insider’s look at what it takes to create a game that resonates with players across the globe.

What was the original inspiration behind creating Sensible Soccer?

So, in 1988, on the Commodore 64, we made a game called MicroProse Soccer. This was Sensible Software's first football game. We wanted to call it Sensible Soccer, but we went to MicroProse, an American company, and they bought it. They wanted the name changed, and since they gave us money, we said okay.

We had already done a football game that was based quite a lot on Tehkan World Cup, which was an old arcade table game. That was the start for us. Then Kick Off came out, which was an improvement on MicroProse Soccer. At the time, we were playing a lot of Kick Off while making Mega-Lo-Mania, which was the game we worked on before we did Sensible Soccer.

About halfway through making Mega-Lo-Mania, we decided we should do another football game. So, we took the Mega-Lo-Mania view, used the same sprites, and kept the same perspective. We made a pitch to the same scale and perspective, and it just worked. It was basically Mega-Lo-Mania men running around in a football game.

So, this is how it came about. As for other elements of the game—when I was a kid, we didn’t have computer games. Growing up in the ’70s, toward the end of the decade, some people had things like Atari and other stuff, but I played Subbuteo when I was a kid. Subbuteo was, I guess, more of a British thing.

It’s a physical game where you’ve got these little players that you set up on a pitch. You have the pitch, plastic goals, and the little players on these round bases. You flick them to move them. You’d have red teams, blue teams, and eventually hundreds of different kits. For example, a blue-and-white team could be Everton, but it could also be Italy, or it could represent another team. They had multiple uses, you know?

You’d learn about the football world through it. They even gave you a manual that said things like, "The red team with white shorts is Manchester United, but it’s also Benfica, or it could be the Hungarian national team." I grew up with this list of teams and kits, so when we got the Sensible Soccer controls working well, I wanted to put it into a world like Subbuteo, inspired by what I played growing up.

The bad thing about Subbuteo, though, is that it’s single-player or two-player only—you can’t play against the AI. When I was a kid, I’d set everything up on the floor, waiting for my dad to come home from work. As soon as he opened the door, I’d say, “Do you want to play Subbuteo?” I’d already have it all ready to go. Sometimes he’d say yes, and sometimes he’d say no. For me, Sensible Soccer was about making a game where you always have an opponent. A game where you can play any team in the world. That was the main focus of Sensible Soccer.

The series has maintained a loyal fan base for decades. In your opinion, what aspects of the game contributed to its lasting appeal, and why do you think it resonated with so many players around the globe?

Okay, so when we made this game, during the first two months we played it, it was amazing. We could tell in our office that it was something special. I’ve never made a game like this before or since—it was just magic the way the football worked. We decided, “Right, we’re never going to touch these core pieces.” We put them in a sort of golden box and left them as they were, and that’s exactly what we did. I think the playability is what really made it stick. If there’s one most important thing, it’s that.

The second thing is that, at the time, apart from Kick Off, there weren’t many other decent football games. There wasn’t as much competition as there is now—there was no EA with a hundred-million-dollar marketing budget to crush you. Also, we included so many different countries and leagues. We had leagues from Eastern Europe, El Salvador, Division 3 in England, South Africa, and so many other places that no one had ever seen represented in a football game. For example, we had Bratislava in the game—you probably hadn’t seen anything from your country in a game before. I think that was really big for the international appeal. Most games back then were focused on the US, maybe a bit on the UK, Japan, or France, depending on where the developers were from. We were also the first game to include players with blonde hair or dark skin, so they actually looked like they did on your TV.

I think the research into the real world and the accuracy we aimed for, along with genuinely caring about people in other countries, is what really worked. What I notice now is not just that it’s lasted a long time, but that it’s lasted a long time in so many countries. For example, the tournaments that the SensibleSoccer.de guys set up—I’ve been to one. I think it was in Berlin. I went, and I lost every game. I wasn’t happy about that, but seeing people from different nations, like someone playing in a Croatian shirt, was really amazing for me. That was incredible to see. Another big factor was the community. When we stopped producing the game around 1998, they decided to keep it going. That’s been a huge part of sustaining it over the years.

The weird answer is piracy. When we made Sensible Soccer, we sold about 2 million copies across all the versions and platforms. But piracy was about 20 to 1. That means something like 40 million people played it. Entire markets were playing pirated copies. I’m guessing in Slovakia in ’92, ’93, or ’94, it wasn’t possible to buy the game, right? So, even though financially it would’ve been nice to make more money, most people wouldn’t have been able to pay for it anyway. I think that ability to pirate it and share it actually helped keep the legacy alive for longer, which is a bizarre answer, but it’s true.

How do you view the evolution of your game design philosophy over the years, and how has it influenced your work on Sociable Soccer?

Okay, great question! What I’ve learned over the years is that, although I know a lot about game design, the whole world within which I’m designing is always changing. For example, touch screens were invented about 20 years ago, right? Then, around 15 years ago, they became a significant part of gaming. That was an entirely new thing to consider, and it had a massive influence on game design. It affects how you lay out menus, the size of the screen, the size of the graphics—everything.

Then you’ve got changes in technology like internet play or monetization systems. The current trend is free-to-play, which is very different from the old model where you’d pay $20 for a boxed game. Now, as a game designer, you need to find ways to extract revenue from players through various mechanics. All of these factors—hardware limitations, monetization models, and more—completely change how you design games.

Most games tend to copy each other, but occasionally, you’ll get something new that adds fresh ideas to the mix. Those are the games you can learn from and absorb ideas. For example, in Sociable Soccer now, we’ve got collectible cards. We’ve got the FIFA license, which is fantastic because it lets us use photos of real players on the cards.

We’ve also added online play, and I’d like to expand on that. In our career mode, how you acquire players is quite interesting. Back when we designed Sensible Soccer, there was no need to worry about player licenses. The very first version had all the real player names, and we didn’t have to pay anything for it.

When we started working on Sociable Soccer, we could have gone the route of doing a player market. But there was a problem. At that time, we didn’t have the FIFA license. Now we do, and we’ve got 13,000 real players in the game, which is fantastic. But when we were designing it, we didn’t have the license, and I made the decision that it was absolutely pointless to have a player market where all the players are made up. No one’s going to search for made-up players—you need the license, and that’s not cheap, right? So, we couldn’t do it back then. Now that we have the license, we can start thinking about adding player market features, like searching for specific players. But at the time, it just wasn’t possible.

The thing about game design is that it’s really slow. You might have an idea, but sometimes it takes a year or more to make it happen. You can’t just change things quickly. You have to ensure that everything works on every single platform. Another big change now is that games are hosted on servers. Every player’s account lives on the server, and what you’re playing on your device is basically just sending inputs, like adding a new player or upgrading one. It’s all connected to the server, where the game really lives. Back in the day, everything was on one machine, so things were much simpler. Now, online functionality has made everything far more complicated and slower. Every time you update a feature, you have to update both the client and the server.

As a designer, you learn to absorb everything—everyone else’s ideas—and you never stop. A good game designer doesn’t guarantee a good game because no one can do that. What a good designer does is minimize the chances of making bad mistakes. They’re more likely to make the right decisions, but that doesn’t mean they’ll always come up with something groundbreaking. Better teams and better designers are more likely to create good things because they’ve proven they can do it before. Over the years, I’ve become very philosophical about this because I’ve been doing it for so long.

The other thing is, a lot of people don’t really understand what a game designer is. They think it’s just someone who comes up with an idea. But that’s only the first five minutes. Then what? Every single facet of a game needs to be designed, controlled, and often iterated. You’re constantly trying things out and proposing ideas to the programming team. Sometimes they’ll come back and say, “No way, that’s not possible.” So, you have to go back and redesign. Or someone else on the team might have a great idea, and you take it and say, “Okay, we’re putting that in.” A good game designer acts like a funnel—taking in all the input but carefully controlling what comes out at the bottom.

What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during all those years, from the development environment in the 90s to the modern landscape when working on Sociable Soccer?

So, if you look at the challenges in the early 90s, like on the Amiga, it was perfect to work on because there weren’t many challenges. The machine contained everything—it was controlled, it didn’t waver, and it couldn’t vary. So, the challenges were very limited on the Amiga. It was easy. Of course, you could only work within the memory and graphics capabilities of the machine, but it was still easy.

When we moved forward to Sensible Soccer 98, which was terrible, that 3D thing we did was really hard because there weren’t any 3D engines off the shelf. So, when we were doing it, we had to create our own 3D engine first, which took us a year and a half before we even got any graphics on the screen. That was a horrendous challenge. Now, we’ve solved that with engines like Unity and Unreal. We’re using Unity, but both are good. The challenge now is the servers. You’ve got links to Facebook, etc. When you do multiplayer, it’s not just about multiplayer—it’s also about making sure it conforms with all of Sony’s, Microsoft’s, and Nintendo’s multiplayer regulations. Each platform has its own demands. So, all these outside influences—Internet, platform holders, monetization, data protection, and security—impact us a lot. That probably takes up half of our time now.

What were the biggest challenges in securing and managing licenses that you've mentioned? Over 13,000 players, that’s huge!

So, we’ve had two main licenses in the game. We’ve had a long-term relationship with the Chinese Super League via a Chinese publisher called Crazy Sports, which we signed a deal with in 2018. That deal gave us the Chinese Super League license to include it in the Apple Arcade version for five years. That’s why you’ve always had Chinese League players. We initially got really good players, like Oscar and others. But eventually, everyone left the Chinese League, so we lost those top players.

More recently, at the end of 2023, we signed the FIFPro deal. We’d been in talks with FIFPro for two years. It’s not an easy process—they’re great people to work with, but you need to prove your game and get the right deal. FIFPro actually gives you access to more than 30,000 players. I think you could get around 20,000 if you wanted, but some leagues we don’t support. They’re all federated football leagues, like the French, Italian, Spanish, and English leagues. You get access to those players through one deal. That allows us to use their names and images, but we actually need to buy the photos separately. They don’t provide the photos, just the right to use them.

And how did you ensure that the players' characteristics were faithfully represented in the game?

Okay, so we have a guy called Dave White, who initially did all the data updates for SWOS when people were keeping it alive after we stopped working on it. We found out that Dave was handling the data, so we brought him on board. He’s been responsible for the data in SWOS, and now he‘s making sure that the information about players is accurate. We constantly update it. If players retire, we have to remove them. We also need to add new players, change which clubs they're in, and adjust for relegations. It’s a continuous process that’s always evolving.

How has the community feedback shaped the development of Sociable Soccer?

What's interesting is, we've been aware that with such a big, complex game across all these platforms, there are always going to be errors. I would say 90% of the community feedback has been about issues we already know about and agree with. The real challenge for us has been deciding what order to fix things in. There’s always a list of things to do later. But the community has really helped us prioritize what to tackle first. Early on, it was clear that the main issues were getting the difficulty level right, which is tough because some people say it’s too easy, and others say it’s too hard. Then there were the goalkeepers. Those two were the most important things to focus on, because goalkeepers have such a massive influence on the gameplay.

This was all about balancing the statistics within the game and finding the right level, which is harder than you might think. Everyone has a different feeling, so figuring out how to tweak things wasn’t easy. But I think we’ve got it right now because people have stopped complaining. That’s a good sign.

What are your thoughts on the current state of sports games in the industry, and how do you see the genre evolving in the next few years? Where does Sociable Soccer fit into that vision?

I think sports games have become synonymous with license simulations. Over the last 10 years, for example, people just say, "Oh, I was playing FIFA." They don’t even refer to it as a football game anymore; they just call it FIFA, like it's the only football game. This has been frustrating for me because the possibility of doing something different from a simulation has almost been taken off the table.

But if you play Sociable Soccer, we're showing that you can create a decent quality arcade football game with licenses—something a bit different. Now, our challenge is moving that experience to all platforms, including mobile. We've been in Apple Arcade for five years, and during that time, we were blocked from doing a mobile version. That changed last year, so now we can go to mobile as well as PC and consoles.

The challenge is how to connect all these platforms as smoothly as possible. How do we make touchscreen controls good enough for mobile players, especially when they're not as precise as a dedicated controller? Or how do we encourage players to start using controllers on their mobile devices? Many countries, like India and China, have massive populations, and virtually everyone has a mobile phone. How can we bring arcade gameplay to that platform and make it work? And how do we sync accounts across platforms to create one identity for all players?

We’ve gone for a Fortnite-style very deliberately, because we wanted to simplify things so more kids could play it. It plays like FIFA in terms of button layout—simple and accessible. The engine is like Sensible Soccer, but the controls are more like FIFA, much simpler. The idea was to make it accessible for everyone. Even the Mega Drive version of Sensible Soccer back in ’93 had two buttons—people often say it had just one, but no, in ’93 we had multiple buttons.

For the industry itself, I think it’s important to move away from the idea that a football game must be a simulation or a management game, or something very cartoony like Mario Strikers, where the ball catches fire. That old-fashioned arcade style, where the game is faster and the rhythm is more like table tennis, is something we’ve embraced. It’s all about finding new ways to do things, just like in driving games or fighting games. Innovation comes from thinking beyond what’s already been done. It’s only people with limited imaginations who say there’s nothing more to create. And usually, hardware itself drives that innovation. That's it.