A Sensible Obsession

As the saying goes, when life gives you lemons…make lemonade.

Over the last few years life has thrown its fair share of lemons at me, and strangely enough my lemonade was writing a 72 page book on the 1992 video game, Sensible Soccer.

Without going into too much detail, I was in a bad place mentally. Whilst trying to deal with my issues, I was grasping for some form of escapism and found myself reverting to my childhood ways of dealing with my problems.

Growing up, the video game Sensible Soccer was my escape, so I decided to dig out my Mega Drive and regress back into my childhood obsession. Sensible Soccer defined my gaming upbringing and unlike most other diehard fans of the series, my experience wasn’t on the PC or Amiga but (the generally considered inferior) Sega Mega Drive version.

When I say obsessed, I mean obsessed. I created my own fictional club at the age of nine and pushed all my friends into creating theirs. We created a world akin to that seen in a game of Dungeons and Dragons with our own paper-based transfer system and player medicals. We named our stadiums and tournaments, designed our kits and gave each player a personality. We even had our own childhood version of the FA to maintain fairness and balance. This lasted from 1996 all the way to 2003, throughout most of our formative years.

We set up our home in the world of Custom Teams, amongst the random and bizarre. We picked our players from household items, crisp flavours, family members and by flicking through the Merlin Premier League sticker books. For example, my midfield consisted of David Beckham, a stick of dynamite, a player named No-Nonsense and my first crush Alex Mack (Larisa Oleynik from the classic Nickelodeon show).

When playing the likes of Championship/Football Manager there was always a sense of pride when you discovered a player from the depths of obscurity that eventually went on to become a worldwide star. For us on Sensible, the opposite often occurred, and we made stars out of the likes of Celtic’s Harald Brattbakk and Middlesbrough's Mikkel Beck both of which failed to set the British game alight in real life but became absolute legends of our own universe. Whilst each player on Sensible Soccer was technically the same, we created our own rich history.

So, with all that in mind, when I restarted my Sensible journey in the present day, I had no choice but to recreate our world from scratch once again. It was most certainly a labour of love, being on Mega Drive all the teams and players had to be edited on a controller, there was no luxury of an Amiga keyboard. By my calculations, every time the cartridge memory reset, I’d have to manually input over 192 player names via the D-pad.

It had been a while since I last delved into this world and my skills simply just weren’t what they used to be. I once considered myself one of the greats and here I was finding myself in a relegation dog fight.

Yet instead of being annoyed by my diminishing ability, I thrived upon it. I was overcome with determination to take my team back to its fighting best and smash the likes of table toppers Sensible XI and Christmas City into the ground. I can’t recall being as emotionally invested in a video game as I was about my rediscovery of Sensi. I was enjoying my battle of a season far more than a top of the league run, it was a challenge to overcome.

After reclaiming my crown as league champions, the following season, I decided to take my obsession one step further and edit my team onto Pro Evolution Soccer 2018 for the PS4. However, I didn’t stop with just my team and before I knew it, I’d recreated every single one of the clubs that my friends and I created as kids. Yet that still wasn’t enough, my OCD brain wanted a full league, then when that was complete, I then created a second division. The deeper I went the more obsessed I became and before I knew it, I’d edited a total of 40 clubs and around 920 individual players, each with unique home and away kits complete with badges and sponsors. I’ve spent more time editing than I ever will actually playing the game!

The obsession started to take over, and at one point had to be curbed when I started created each of the random club logos in excruciating detail. Editing them pixel by pixel in Microsoft Paint, in my lunch break and getting some very dodgy looks from my colleagues.

During this time my parents decided to clear out the attic and amongst all the stuff from my childhood was my Sensible Soccer homemade memorabilia. It was like stepping foot in a time machine. There was notepads filled with team sheets, player profiles, kit designs and even handmade matchday programmes. I decided that I wanted to make a proper archive, a home for all my Sensible memories and history, combining the old world with the new work I’d done recreating it all on PES.

This book was written purely for myself, it’s almost a biographical account of my fictional club and childhood experiences. The end-game was never publication, it was purely just for me and completing it was a personal journey I had to go on, it was almost as if I had to get it all out on paper in order to finally move on. To anyone else it may seem like a man during a midlife crisis and to be honest that’s something I can’t really argue with, apart from those people who lived it alongside me it would just look like the ramblings of a mad man. Yet writing and gaming helped me heal, it became such a cathartic experience, a much-needed source of escapism to a world where I had complete control.

I’d lost touch with many of the friends involved in my Sensible Soccer experience and writing this book was like revisiting them one by one. It led me to reach out to one of those old friends and since then we’ve spent many an evening on the Mega Drive and PES together reliving those glory years. There’s such a stigma of shame attached to talking about mental health, especially amongst men. I opened up to my friend on why I’d decided to create all this, it turned out he’d had a similar experience and his support really helped me through. Gaming didn’t just help me run away from my problems; in a weird twist of fate, it helped me deal with them.

At one point I did question my obsession, I spoke to my therapist who encouraged me to keep writing about my experiences. Although, I do wonder if she understood how much it really took over my life whether she’d be so encouraging.

I ended up printing out about 10 copies of my book and gave them to close friends and family. Reading it made my mum and dad tear up, as it was a chance for me to say thank you for raising me and made them reminisce about my younger years and days gone by, back when around fifteen kids would be crammed into a scorching hot conservatory to watch the latest Sensi tournament.

Not a single person had a bad thing to say (at least to my face) I’ve spend more hours on that book and updating PES than I’d ever be happy to disclose, my wife once commented that if I showed this much interest in things that really matter then the sky would be the limit and she’s not wrong. How she put up with me during this time I’ll never know, yet she not only listened and proofread my work but ended up becoming my editor. Knowing just how much it meant to me in the grand scheme of things to get this thing finished.

I was proud of what I’d accomplished and eventually turned the introduction of my book into an article showcasing the power of editing and childhood imagination. I contacted a few websites and eventually got myself published. A few re-tweets later and my work ended up being read by the co-creator of Sensible Software, Jon Hare. He now knew Luke United existed and just what his game had meant to us as kids, it really was a dream come true.

I set myself a goal and I achieved it.

The escapism of Sensible Soccer allowed me to put my real-life problems to a side, for just a little while. Whilst there were some things in life I couldn’t control, this world was mine, a world I had complete control of, and I think that’s what drew me back into the game. It allowed me to reconnect with old friends and gave me a new hobby and passion for writing. I had such positive feedback from my article and writing that it made me realise I wasn’t alone and that meant the world to me.

Was it the healthiest way to go about dealing with depression? Most definitely not, yet it was a form of therapy I most definitely needed.

To read the article mentioned above, please click here.