TVG.SPEAKS...Jon Hare Feature
Derek dela Fuente
01/12/2005
TVG chats to Jon Hare about the Past, Present and Future – The Sensible Way...
Jon Hare, of Sensible Software fame, was one of the select and inspirational voices within the industry in the 90s. He headed Sensible Software which was one of the most successful and talked about Britsoft teams. Right up until their demise Sensible Software was always hot news and you could be assured of getting some really interesting stories/views when you spoke with Jon. He was both direct and forceful in thoughts but he always spoke sense and certainly ruffled a few feathers within the industry, especially at the top. One of the last ventures that Sensible Software undertook was work on a game called Sex, Drugs, n Rock n Roll which at the time courted controversy, but in terms of game ideas and design was a real breath of fresh air and deemed to be a blockbuster of a game in the making. Looking back, it was certainly years ahead of its time. Graphically it was stunning, sound wise it featured some great headbangin music and story wise it offered a new direction. Derek dela Fuente spoke with Jon Hare about the demise of Sensible and the possibilities of other Sensible games including Sex, Drug n Rock n Roll being brought into the 00ās.
What is your input and position at Codemasters and what made you decide to go there?
OK a brief potted history of my association with Codemasters. When we were working on our game Sex, Drug n Rock n Roll, a good few years back, around about ā97, we managed to get it back from the publisher GT and went around a few companies trying to sell it. Codemasters was one of the companies we showed the game to and it was my first ever dealing with them. Around a year and a half later when we decided to sell Sensible I went to Codemasters to see if they were interested, they said there were and signed a 6 month contract selling the company to them. As part of the sale deal it was agreed contractually that I would carry on working for them. Initially, in fact, working on a Cannon Fodder sequel, which was developed on and off for a few years but never made it past the first stage of development. I also, at the time, did second opinion (consultancy) design work on games like Micro Machines and Insania - never on any real level but merely passing over thoughts to people like Richard and David Darling.
I also did some work on Prince Nasem Boxing which they had in development for two and a half years and were struggling to decide what to do to complete the project. There were varied opinions has to what should go into the game. They asked me to work with their development team in Fulham to finish the title, which I did.
I then looked at a prototype of a football game in the Fulham Studio, Club Football.
They then wanted to do a sequel to Mike Tysonās Boxing and worked with Atomic Planet in Middlesbrough.
After three years I needed a break from Codemasters. It has been 13 non stop years with Sensible, since I was 19. I then did do some work on Front Line Commandos but needed to take my āfootā off the pedal so the next year I looked at other items fairly speculatively, thought about a new start up company, did some public speaking (a loud laugh). I also did some consultancy work, especially with Elixir. One of the most important facts throughout this period is that all the time Iāve been associated with Codemasters and Iāve been working with them for 6 and a half years on and off is that I was hoping they would want a new Sensible Soccer which of course they did!
In effect I was kind of frustrated when Iād worked on the Cannon Fodder sequel. Iāve not really had any sort of power to make any demands from Codemasters who own the Intellectual properties of a number of Sensible Games. In fact with my other company, Tower, (Mike Montgomery (Ex Bitmap) John Phillips (Ex Bitmap)) we developed the mobile version of Sensible Soccer and it was also released on the Radica stick.
Your last comment brings us nicely to the question of why we are constantly seeing Sensible Soccer revisited on a number of formats. Why do you envisage that this game, amongst a few, youāve recreated have stood the test of time so well and do you feel that games like Mega Lo Mania and Cannon Fodder and their design concept could be worked on for ā00s versions?
Yes thatās interesting. Weāve done quite a lot of research as we were prototyping Sensible Soccer before it went to full build. The research was on the publicās opinions on football games. What came out, and people did not really know what we were fully doing, was that Sensible Soccer is the second most popular football game in the country at the moment. I can qualify that in terms of, obviously Pro Evo and FIFA are the biggest selling football games by quite a margin but if you ask people individually what their first and second favourite games are, more people will tell you that Sensible is their second favourite game. Reason being is that Pro Evo and FIFA are fairly exclusive to each other - so who likes one tends to hate the other - whereas Sensible Soccer tends to sit in the middle. The license is still well known and has a good reputation. My analogy would be Sensible Soccer is like a bowl of Cornflakes, itās good but maybe not as fun as Coca Pops but really nice!
I also feel slightly more cynically in a license driven industry that companies have got to look how to exploit licenses they already own and look at getting the best out of their back catalogue. I do know that Codemasters is looking hard at original products.
Itās interesting with all the attention on Sensible Soccer and having worked on a new Cannon Fodder, and I was really pleased with the design, that I would love other Sensible titles to come to life again for they are contemporary in design and would easily stand the test of time - Mega Lo Mania I would love to see modernised. Mega lo Mania really suffered for it was released around the time of the Maxwell empire collapsing and the whole Mirror Group (MirrorSoft) blew up 2 months after the release of the game. This stopped the game really having any momentum. Like Iāve previously mentioned Iām really very happy with the Radica Stick that was released recently that had Cannon Fodder and Mega Lo Mania on it.
Have you any thoughts why there are so few figureheads within the industry nowadays, certainly heads of development teams who have a voice. Is it because publishers are calling the shots and dev teams just want to play safe or are most dev heads purely a title with no real opinions?
Iām not at all surprised there are no real figureheads around. From around 94/95 since the likes of Sony, Bertlemans/Warner moved in they brought in a new corporate way of doing things. They offered a lot of money to make products, which was very nice, but also came a disempowerment of creative teams and a sense of establishing a label. Prior to that with teams like Sensible, Bitmap Brothers, Graftgold, etc. it was acceptable and seen as quite the opposite. Publishers like Virgin actively liked working with teams like Sensible; they could make money off the back of our name, which is more along the lines of a music act. I donāt quite understand why that has been under used or why that corporate ethos has been pushed so hard because I donāt see what they stand to gain. You are always gong to make the money from your label quite frankly, unless you are EA and you are colossal with your label and buy in huge licences. Perhaps the licences have replaced the team names. If you have a creative game that is new and you are trying to establish yourself Iād have thought, as you see from time to time, adding a name like āArcher MacLeanāsā Pool it tends to be an individual that gives the game a focus.
Peter Molyneuxās releases with Lionhead is another case. Sometimes you see his name associated with his game and sometimes not. Peter is a rarity. I donāt know why establishing a name over the last few years has not happened but I do feel it has cost the industry a lot. The art of marketing and it is one aspect I feel very strong about, is that we have forgotten how to market original products in our industry. They have become lazy, and fearful.
What teams like ours and the Bitmaps were good at was self promotion off the back of a good product. We would go and see the mags, go down the pub and end up with a 4 page article. It really irritates me that the big publishers are missing a trick here. We got great publicity and it didnāt cost a penny and we got people interested in our product and company, on a street, personal level, with the buyers. It all makes for more interesting editorial. I think that the control that big publishers have over products, and their fear of losing control, has caused a lot of problems. If they let someone like me for instance go out and do promotions (and Iām pleased that Codemasters are letting me at the moment) they will get good PR. To finally answer your question, why so few figureheads, well there isnāt the opportunity! Then we have, and yes I am rambling, the Producers. Producers have been pushed internally within companies and basically assigned to manage a product, where some of them do a good job. There are producers who work for the publisher; the go between for them and the developer, ensuring product is done. Then there is the producer within the dev company who tends to be involved more with the product, manage the team (individually) and creatively minded but what most producers lack is creative flare and visionary qualities that of old fashioned game makers! What Iām saying is those figureheads were also creative people. Now figurehead/producers within companies are administrative people, yes who understand product but do not have the spark about them.
Too many development teams have been reduced to people churning out sequels or conversions.
It did appear that Sensible Software disappeared in a very short time and the name and games are still fondly remembered. Do you ever feel you should have tried more avenues to keep the team together and what became of the other ex-Sensible staff such as Chris Yates?
It very much came to a head with Sex Drugs n Rock n Roll but this wasnāt the cause of the demise of Sensible it was a combination of a number of games. In effect, times were changing. We had been doing what we liked, creating games for many years and it was becoming harder and harder. In order to continue on it meant doubling the size of the company, which neither us fancied. Chris liked Sensible as a small unit and I didnāt fancy taking on another level of middle management. One of the weaknesses, if you can call it that, was that we never trusted anyone. We did our own accounts, dealt with people legally, etc. We did not want to become a big corporate company. All the successful years was as a small team, a bit like a band.
Chris lives in the same area I do still. He was working on a lot of handheld, palm pilot stuff. Iāve not seen Chris for a couple of years and donāt know exactly what he is doing but believe he set up a team in Saffron Waldron.
Back to Sex, Drugs n Rock n Roll in 1999 which got some great coverage from the games press and the likes of the Independent and other big media publications. Looking at the concept, even imagery, it still looks fresh and could certainly hit the mark now. Although it was slightly risky, it is perfect for the current climate - any thoughts?
Like Iāve mentioned I hope it may reappear! My day to day life sees me doing consultancy, pushing things under people noses, even selling myself, which is very tedious. Sex, Drugs n Rock n Roll I worked on for around 5 years and Warner, who we signed it to, gave us a lot of money for it, around a million pounds. Our problems with the game started when Warner bought GT; Warner being a media company established for many years (Bible belt owned) and their business philosophy was very different and so we were put in a very difficult situation with two thirds of our company focused around this game. Warner did not want the product nor would they pull it from our contract which caused problems. We also had another game from the GT/Warner deal, Have a Nice Day, which hit some technical barriers, Sensible Soccer was struggling with the 3D and so all three games were problematic. Some of the problems were caused by the fact that we made the transition from the Amiga very late and so we were 2 years behind everybody. We hadnāt really taken into account the need for larger programming teams and having to deal with 3D and animation. Because weād been so successful on the Amiga we had stayed on it a lot longer that most.
In effect we didnāt have the staff nor the infrastructure (middle management) to get good staff. Sex and Drugs sort of carried the can for our demise even though Chris and myself personally put extra money into the game but it was very hard to resell. The game might have appeared to have been an outlandish game but it wasnāt. Yes it is a good concept that Iād like to work on again. The game was very much written around lots of music and Richard Joseph and I wrote and produced around 30 tracks for the game, which was very nearly finished before it was stopped. We are actually doing something with this soundtrack presently!
You have insinuated that too many games are working towards a successful formula and not enough invention or even risks are taken with games nowadays, would you like to expand?
A lot has to do with the production cost. If you produce a game now for the price and cost that we made on the Amiga youād see a lot more risks being taken. Truth is you just canāt finance development of a commercial quality product from start to finish and not know it will get on the shelf and so a lot of the content has to be compromised. It is something that I have been wittering on about for so long that until you have standardisation of hardware, you donāt have cheap tools and you donāt have an easy route for creating products and so development costs remain high.
So the industry has changed, does this equate to being more professional?
It has become more corporately professional but not creatively professional!
We ran Sensible Sofware for 13 years from 1986 to 1999 and our average annual profit was around of 49% as a company. That is spectacular. I couldnāt set up a dev team now and make that kind of profit and that is why I have not set up a new team. It is not financially worth it.
From a development point of view the products are not getting better, nor is the money and you are not even controlling your own IP, now thatās not professional, thatās S**T!
Another fact is that relative to the capability of the machine I would challenge people to say that coders get the best from current machines. You only have to look at Geoff Crammondās Stunt Car Racer on the Amiga 10 years ago. That was amazing. From what the machine could produce and what he could get out of the machine highlights that people really mastered their machines in those days. Put 4 or 5 games out on a machine and you begin to master it. My old programmer Chris was a brilliant programmer and they got to express their genius marrying that in with a creative level on those machines. Part of being professional as an artist, a creative person, was to have good ideas, see them through, ensuring they are well polished and not only of a commercially good standard but with that little bit of inspiration/genius in them. Now the production schedule is so squeezed you never get a chance to add that extra 20 percent at the end that makes all the difference.
So many will now be asking why have you been so quiet, personally, over the last few years as your views would certainly ensure many heated debates?
I have been in the gaming industry for 19 years. I believe that you must wait until your āstarā is going up as opposed to going down. I have been involved in a number of products and this is over the last five or six years that have for one reason or another not been released, plus add to that Sex n Drugs, and Cannon Fodder 3 and also working with Elixir and a product which was excellent that never came out. It doesnāt bother me and itās been good experience and an education. Iāve worked inside over 10 development studios, been a consultant working for publishers and developers. I understand the political situation within companies and before I had only the insight into running an independent development team. Now I really truly understand working in all areas within the industry, I understand how it all fits together but during that process I donāt think that Iāve had any product coming out of any profile. What Iām good at is producing original product and creating and designing original titles, people have forgotten that. Even now, and it is ironic, we have Sensible Soccer coming out, great, Iām happy and proud of it but it is still not seeing who you truly are ā“ someone who design original games! I designed around 20 games up until around 1997. Suddenly people stopped wanting original games so itās quite hard to do your own thing and hopefully if Sensible is successful Codemasters will ask for Cannon Fodder or Mega Lo Mania, whatever, it will give me more of a window, profile, to speak! I hope that people will then start to take on more people like me to produce original product!
People ask why there are so few doing original product and there is only a few, like say Peter Molyneux. Itās simply financial. Peter has also a lot of financial muscle from his previous ventures with Bullfrog and it has put him in a very good position and good luck to him!
TVG would like to thank Jon Hare for offering his thoughts on the industry and Sensible Software. Currently in development for Xbox, PlayStation2, and PC, the brand new Sensible Soccer is set for release in 2006 and will be published by Codemasters.
