Re: *** Call to Action: New Sensible Soccer Game ***

Hi guys,

I ve been thinking an awful lot about Sensible Soccer lately and, buoyed by the news that Dino Dini will soon be announcing a new Kick Off game, I wondered whether or not we should try and approach Codemasters to try and prise the Sensible license from them. Either that, or we could get on side with Jon Hare and put our weight behind him against Codemasters.

Looking at Jon Hare s Tweets at the start of the year, it looks like he was somewhat interested in a spiritual successor to Sensible Soccer. Any thoughts further than that, I do not know. Here s the Tweet I m referring to;
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I don t know whether Jon has thought about Kickstarter to fund a new game, or whether the feedback from his Tweets was such that he decided against it, but surely Kickstarter is a very low-risk way of assessing the demand for a new Sensible Soccer game?

It just strikes me that there *has* to be something we can do. You guys are an amazingly strong community. We all want a new Jon Hare football game, so I really think we should try with all our might to contact Codies to release the source code or even the Sensible Soccer name back to Jon. I sense that he s primed to do something, and I really do believe we need to send him a positive signal that the community is right behind him.

FIFA and PES are not the football games we are looking for - we want a new *FUN* football game, and maybe now the time is right for Sensible Soccer to rise again.

Would love to hear your thoughts; positivity encouraged! Let us not be defeated! !

Those costs seem perfectly valid, Playaveli, but who s to say that we need to contact Codemasters? Why not call it Simple Soccer and have nothing to do with Codemasters at all? That way we don t have to worry about licensing the name back, or handing any royalties over to Codemasters.

In Jon s Tweet, he mentioned that the community could submit their own teams to the database. Thus, there wouldn t be a licensing issue since there aren t any officially licensed teams.

I think the key is that it doesn t have to be as big as SWOS. It can share the same scope as the original Sensible Soccer game. At least to begin with. Then, if it s successful, they can work up to a game like SWOS once they know they have a market.

We have to learn how to walk before we can run, but with a community like us behind him, Jon has a lot of people holding him up. Let s be positive, there are ways of making this happen, we just have to find them.

I don t know man, do we *really* need the Sensible Soccer source code? I think SS06 was a fairly good attempt at re-capturing the magic. I know it was very different from Sensible Soccer, but at the core of it was a really good football game. It was buggy as hell, really rushed and the lack of licenses really hurt it but again, it was a good football game. What I m saying here, is that it s possible to make a good football game from scratch.

You re right that not many games have captured that magic Playa, but they haven t had Jon Hare on board.

I genuinely think that if Jon Hare launched a Kickstarter for a new Simple Soccer (or something else!), it really would work. I m not saying that he could retire as a millionaire, but we would at the very least have a spiritual successor to Sensible Soccer.