Founded 1986 · Chelmsford, England · Founders: Jon Hare,Chris Yates · First game: Parallax (1986)
Jon Hare and Chris Yates made Wizball, Mega-Lo-Mania, Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder — seven British number-one hits — before selling the company to Codemasters in 1999.
Jon Hare and Chris Yates founded Sensible Software in March 1986, after a short spell working at LT Software in Basildon, and based it in Chelmsford. Their first games were for 8-bit machines: Parallax (1986) on the Commodore 64 and then Wizball (1987), an inventive shooter about restoring colour to a grey world that Zzap!64 later voted Game of the Decade. They also produced the Shoot-'Em-Up Construction Kit (1987), which let players build their own shooters. On the 16-bit computers Sensible became one of Britain's most popular developers. Mega-Lo-Mania (1991) was a compact real-time strategy game spanning eras of technology. Sensible Soccer (1992) presented football from a high, zoomed-out view with tiny players, fast passing and aftertouch on the ball, and became a fixture of the Amiga. Cannon Fodder (1993) applied a similar small-sprite style to a military strategy-action game with a satirical anti-war tone. Sensible World of Soccer (1994) expanded the football game with a vast database of real clubs and players and was later entered into Stanford University's Game Canon in 2006. The studio spent heavily on an ambitious adventure, Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll, which was abandoned after its publisher, GT Interactive, dropped it. Sensible Software was sold to Codemasters in 1999, ending its run in June that year, having produced seven number-one hit games.
Sensible's best-known games share a look: tiny characters seen from far above, readable at a glance and quick to control. It let Sensible Soccer show much of the pitch at once and let Cannon Fodder move squads across wide maps — design decisions driven as much by playability as by the limits of the hardware.