Sociable Soccer Coming to Steam Early Access on October12th

Sociable Soccer, the next game from Jon Hare, is going to be released on Steam as an early access title on October 12th. If this morsel of information brought a smile to your face, you are certifiably Old^TM. If those words don’t mean much to you, however, I have nothing to say to you except “get off my lawn”. I’m joking – you can stay. But you’ll have to watch the Sociable Soccer trailer with me and eat some of these stale biscuits.

Sociable Soccer is, as you can probably guess from the name, a football game. It looks like it’s going to focus more of frantic action than simulation – the developers are calling it “faster than f***”. But why should you be interested, with all your FIFAs and your PESes and whatnot? Well, mainly because John Hare, one of the people behind it, is also responsible for Sensible World of Soccer.

SWOS is a soccer game from almost 25 years ago, and a fair number of people would argue it’s still one of the best football games ever made. In a world where sports games have a life span of exactly one year, having an active community a quarter of a century after release is kind of a big deal. SWOS was also famous for its career mode, which let you manage a team – Sociable Soccer’s stance on this is kind of muddled. The FAQ on the official site says the game won’t have a career mode, but the Steam store page mentions manager mode, as well as world mode – a campaign in which you upgrade your manager character.

Here’s what Hare had to say about the early access launch:

We’re hugely excited to be launching on Steam Early Access. This is the first step towards our vision of a new, truly cross-platform, online and offline football action game. Steam Early Access will help us to tweak gameplay, introduce more game modes and respond to fan feedback.