Jon Hare wanted to be a pop star. In 1994 AMIGA POWER reported that his “ultimate ambition is to cut a single and get it into the Gallup Top 10”, and he had started out playing in bands with his school friend Chris Yates. The two of them became Sensible Software instead, with Hare as the artist and designer and Yates as the programmer. ZZAP! called them “‘jovial’ Jon Hare (graphic genius) and ‘cuddly’ Chris Yates (programming prodigy)”. Hare designed Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder, and he still got a song out: “War Has Never Been So Much Fun”, Cannon Fodder’s theme.
Fast facts
- Born: 1966, according to public sources.
- Known as: “Jops”, or “Jovial Jops”, in the magazines.
- Company: co-founder of Sensible Software (1986–1999), later Tower Studios.
- Key games: Wizball, MicroProse Soccer, Mega-lo-Mania, Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder, Sensible World of Soccer, Sociable Soccer.
Sensible Software
Hare and Yates met at school in Essex and formed a band, which Hare said went through the names Zeus, Hamsterfish, Dark Goose and Touchstone. Yates found work as a Spectrum programmer at LT Software in Basildon, and Hare was brought in to do the graphics. In March 1986 they set up Sensible Software with help from a government enterprise scheme. Hare later counted the start among his best moments: coming back from Ocean in Manchester “with a £1,000 cheque after just signing up Parallax on C64, our first ever game as Sensible Software”.
On the Commodore 64 he drew and co-designed Parallax and Wizball for Ocean. For Wizball, he and Yates played guitar and bass lines to Martin Galway, who turned them into the game’s music. MicroProse Soccer followed, and on the Amiga International 3D Tennis, Mega-lo-Mania and Wizkid.
Football was his subject. In October 1991 he told ACE what was wrong with Kick Off 2: “When you play the game you keep thinking that it would be so much better if certain things didn’t happen and other things did.” His answer was Sensible Soccer (1992), in which the computer runs the nearest player to the ball so that the person holding the joystick only has to decide what to do with it. In the same interview he described the management game, with real players, transfers and national teams, that became Sensible World of Soccer in 1994.
Cannon Fodder (1993) was his design too. He described its starting point to Edge: “You take a bit of what Sensible stuff looked like, take Gauntlet, take explosive hardware.” He wrote the riff and the singing for its theme song and took them to the musician Richard Joseph to finish. When the poppy on its packaging caused a row, he told Amiga Computing that Sensible had chosen it “because the poppy symbolised people dying in war and a lot of people die in Cannon Fodder so it seemed appropriate”. His next project, Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll, was “a labour of love”, Edge reported, but after Time Warner dropped it as too risqué no other publisher made an acceptable offer, and it was never released.
After Sensible
Codemasters bought Sensible Software in 1999, and Hare went with it to lead new projects. Looking back in Edge in 2000, he said that he and Yates had come through thirteen years, “the last two of which had been living hell”, “without ever having had a single argument”.
By 2005 he was running Tower Studios, which Retro Gamer reported he ran with John Phillips and Mike Montgomery of the Bitmap Brothers. Its first work was a set of Java versions of Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder for mobile phones, published by Kuju Wireless. Hare said the deal gave them “the unique opportunity to re-vamp some of our classic old games for a younger audience”. The same year he explained to Edge what he thought made his football game different: “Sensi recreates football psychologically – the pace makes it more akin to football as a mental activity, as opposed to Pro Evo and FIFA which show you what it looks like on the television.” Codemasters then brought him back for a new Sensible Soccer, released in April 2006.
He kept playing music too. Retro Gamer reported him on stage with period game musicians, playing bass at a 2004 concert and guitar alongside Ben Daglish, Mark Knight and Chris Abbott in 2005.
Public sources record his later work outside the magazines. He worked on a high-definition remake of the Bitmap Brothers’ Speedball 2 (2013), and ran a Kickstarter in 2015 for Sociable Soccer, an overhead football game in the Sensible Soccer tradition. The campaign did not reach its target, but the game was developed anyway, with the Finnish studio Combo Breaker, reaching Steam Early Access in 2017 and Apple Arcade in 2019. Sociable Soccer 25, made by Amuzo Games with Tower Studios, was released on PC in November 2024 and on consoles in 2024 and 2025.
Sources
- ZZAP! issue 61, May 1990, pp. 36–39: feature on Sensible Software by Robin Hogg (the nicknames and roles, the school band, the founding).
- The One issue 21, June 1990: “Court in the Act” (LT Software).
- Amiga Format Special issue 4, 1992: company history by Jon Hare (March 1986, LT Software of Basildon, the band names).
- ACE issue 49, October 1991: “A Sensible approach” (Hare on Kick Off 2 and his plans for Sensible Soccer).
- AMIGA POWER issue 38, June 1994: “Diary of a Game: Sensible Golf” (Hare’s ambition to reach the Top 10).
- Amiga Computing issue 83, February 1995: Hare on the poppy.
- Edge issue 72, June 1999: Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll. Issue 73, July 1999: “Sensible buy for Codemasters”.
- Edge issue 90, November 2000, p. 146: “Codemasters’ Jon Hare counts ten” (the Parallax cheque, the sale).
- Edge issue 138, July 2004, pp. 114–117: “The making of… Cannon Fodder” (Gauntlet, the theme song and Richard Joseph).
- Edge issue 154, October 2005: Hare as creative director of Tower Studios; the quotation on Sensible Soccer.
- Retro Gamer issue 9, 2004, and issue 14, 2005: Hare playing at concerts of game music.
- Retro Gamer issue 15, 2005: “Mobile Arcade” by David Crookes (Tower Studios, John Phillips and Mike Montgomery, Kuju Wireless).
- Retro Gamer issue 19, 2005, and issue 22, 2006: the new Sensible Soccer (released 7 April).
- Retro Gamer issue 31, 2006: “The Making of Wizball” (the guitar and bass lines).
- Wikipedia, “Jon Hare” and “Sociable Soccer” (web, secondary): date and place of birth; Speedball 2 HD; the Kickstarter, Combo Breaker, Steam Early Access, Apple Arcade and Sociable Soccer 25.