An insider time-line!

SLOW TRAIN COMIN

The Amiga version was delayed so many times, it ended up with an entire squad of abandoned release dates in the Custom Teams section of the game. Here s an abridged timetable:

DECEMBER 1993 - this is clearly not on.

MARCH 1994 - someone wonders out loud if maybe Sensible oughtn t to start getting on with it. However, it s only 3 o clock in the afternoon, so there s no-one else in the offices to hear him.

MAY 1994 - it didn t take anyone long to realise that releasing SWOS within days of the end of the season was a pretty silly idea. The fact that the game was only 20% complete at this stage was the final clincher.

JUNE 1994 - Why not release it just before the World Cup?

Because it s still just Sensible Soccer with a different title screen.

AUGUST 1994 - the start of the 1994-95 season sounds like a good idea. Sadly, a colossal underestimation of the difficulty involved in collating accurate data for over 1,500 real-life football teams, often from obscure parts of Zambia or Ecuador, means that there s about as much chance of it happening as there is of Terry Hurlock not getting booked this season.

OCTOBER 1994 - this was still thought to be a probable date, right up to around the 30th of September 1994.

DECEMBER 1994 - after a particularly harrowing final stint in which programmer Chris Chapman didn t leave the Sensible offices for over a fortnight, snatching the occasional two hours sleep on the floor, the game makes it out just in time for Christmas, where the team s toil is rewarded by the game selling over 100,000 copies and crashing straight into the charts at No.1, where it remains for the next five months.

JANUARY 1995 - the offices of Sensible and almost every Amiga magazine in the country are beseiged with letters and telephone calls complaining about bugs in the game which cause, amongst other things, players scoring over 60 goals in a season to still drop dramatically in value.

FEBRUARY 1995 - a tired and emotional Chris Chapman begins work on both a quick-fix patch disk to be given out on magazine coverdisks, and a full-featured update to be sent out free to all registered owners of the game.

MARCH 1995 - the patch disk appears on a games magazine coverdisk. Hordes of angry registration card-senders get the wrong end of the stick entirely, and complain about not getting the free disk first.

JULY 1995 - the updated, bug-corrected, actually-all-pretty-much-working-properly version of the Amiga game reaches the shelves and is sent out by an embarrassed Warners to the waiting punters who d sent in their registration cards. Someone finds a small, insignificant technical bug. Chris Chapman, at the end of his tether, leaps out of a top-floor window in a suicide attempt foiled only by the fact that Saffron Walden, leafy village home of the Sensible Software HQ, has no buildings whatsoever more than two storeys tall.

AUGUST 1995 - work begins in earnest on the PC conversion.