As one of the most popular football titles of the '90s, Sensible Soccer was released on a wide range of systems, including the Mega Drive, Game Boy, SNES, Jaguar, CD32, Master System and Game Gear—as well as home computers such as the Amiga, ST and PC.
One console which didn't get a port at the time was the NES, but Games That Weren't has discovered that when Enigma Variations was tasked with bringing Sensi to the Game Boy, developer Mark Greenshields was also working on an NES conversion—something that hasn't been revealed until now.
According to Greenshields, development was stopped after around six months when it was decided that the port wasn't up to standard. The fact that, by 1993, the NES was in a sharp decline in the UK also seems to have contributed to this decision.
GTW reports that the game is "essentially complete, but had some glitches and bugs still to iron out before it was in a state to release." This version was unearthed when GTW was tasked with performing some disk recovery work, and the backup code for the NES version was discovered.
"Overall, I’m impressed with how close the graphics are to the Amiga original, even with some obvious compromises due to the palette limitations," comments GTW's Frank Gasking.
"The footballer sprites feel very close and authentic. The menus are all functional, and there are even the in-between screens. It is lacking some final polish. SFX is a bit weedy and no proper crowd noises, palette tweaks may have been needed, no crowd/panel graphics, and the CPU needs a bit of further work for example. However, crucially the game is fully playable and I think its a shame that it wasn’t decided to persevere and finish it."