Cannon Fodder

The idea behind Cannon Fodder predates the game by about a decade. In the summer of 1983, Jon Hare and Chris Yates, who would later found Sensible Software together, stood at opposite ends of a wallpaper table in Yates’ father’s house and fought wars on hand-drawn battlefields using pencils and rulers. The jungle levels they would eventually build into the finished game were not entirely dissimilar. That childhood game, the Ocean Rambo tie-in from the 8-bit era, and Psygnosis’ Lemmings, which the Sensible team had been playing heavily in the office, all fed into the concept Hare described as three influences from three different times converging into one.

Sensible Software had established itself as one of the most prominent Amiga developers in Britain by the early 1990s, operating out of a small one-room office in Essex with a total staff of six. The studio behind Mega Lo Mania and Sensible Soccer was working from a position of genuine market credibility when development on Cannon Fodder began in 1991. The game grew directly from Mega Lo Mania’s structure, taking the strategy of sending groups on missions and grafting onto it the direct real-time control and mouse-driven interface that Sensible had refined across its previous releases. Programmer Jools Jameson’s work on the project was delayed by Mega Drive conversion commitments, and the situation was further complicated when the game’s provisional publisher collapsed. Cannon Fodder had been part of a four-game deal with Mirrorsoft, the software publishing arm of Robert Maxwell’s media empire. Maxwell died in November 1991 and his business interests were liquidated. Sensible, unusually for an independent developer of the period, had no difficulty finding an alternative. They signed with Virgin Interactive in May 1993, with Jon Hare citing the straightforwardness of UK head Tim Chaney as a factor in the decision.

The game released on 11 November 1993. The timing was not accidental. Cannon Fodder’s anti-war message was central to the design from the outset, and the release date was chosen to coincide with Armistice Day. Hare had described the game as the one Sensible had always wanted to make, specifically because it made the senselessness of war legible through play. The cover featured a poppy, chosen to reinforce that message. The Daily Star ran a story claiming it was an insult to the war dead. The Royal British Legion condemned the game. Members of Parliament joined the criticism. Both Cannon Fodder and an issue of Amiga Power magazine that had prominently featured the poppy were required to change their covers. The in-game title screen retained the poppy but carried a disclaimer stating it was not endorsed by the Royal British Legion.

The theme song, titled “War!”, was written by Hare with his frequent musical collaborator Richard Joseph and performed by Hare himself. The music video was shot in a single day on a budget of £500, featuring the entire development team in military uniforms and borrowed masks, including one of Mario and one of Donald Duck. The song’s refrain, that war had never been so much fun, was the line that drew the most sustained criticism. What the critics largely declined to engage with was that the game itself systematically undercut any reading of it as glorification. Every soldier had a name. Every death added a small cross to the hill outside the recruitment office, which grew longer with each mission. The squad you protected was the squad you had built, and losing its most experienced members to a poorly considered attack carried a cost that accumulated over time. The visual language of individual graves was doing the anti-war work more directly than most commentary gave it credit for.

The critical reception on the Amiga was exceptional. Amiga Power gave it 94% and called it more important to the reviewer than eating or sleeping. Amiga Action matched the score, calling it the best game of the year. Amiga Format went higher at 95%, and CU Amiga and The One Amiga both awarded 93%. Across eight major reviews, the average score was 93.1%, making it one of the highest-rated games in UK Amiga magazines at that point. Edge gave it 9 out of 10. GamesMaster awarded 92%. The controversy had not damaged the game’s reception and had almost certainly expanded its audience.

Sensible Software sold the studio to Codemasters in 1999. Hare has since worked as a visiting professor of games at Anglia Ruskin University and continued developing through Tower Studios, which produced mobile versions of both Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder in the mid-2000s. Cannon Fodder 2 arrived in 1994 and was received more sceptically, with reviews noting it felt closer to additional content than a full sequel. A third entry, developed under different circumstances long after the Sensible era, arrived in 2011 with considerably less fanfare. The original remains the version that matters: a game designed by six people in a single office that managed to be both one of the most playable Amiga releases of its generation and a coherent statement about the cost of the thing it was depicting.