Sensible Software’s Jon Hare on the making of Mega lo Mania and the demise of Mirrors

March 2nd, 2014, 02:03 Posted By: wraggster

In this extract from Read-Only Memory’s Sensible Software 1986–1999 retrospective, studio co-founder Jon Hare – lovingly nicknamed ‘Jops’ in the tome – recounts the making of 1991 Amiga strategy game Mega lo Mania to author Gary Penn. Hare is also joined by fellow industry figures of the time to recall Sensible’s doomed deal with Mirrorsoft…

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Mega lo Mania’s involved play is underpinned by the use of tech trees spanning epochs, pre-empting Sid Meier’s Civilization by months, and all wrapped up in real-time strategy game sentiments over a year before Westwood’s Dune II and four years before Command & Conquer. Jops is understandably proud of those facts.Jon Hare: Yeah, it was certainly ahead of its time. The idea of tech trees was in the design from the start – it was the basis of the game. Mega lo Mania was one of the first computer games to use tech trees. Initially though, the game was called ‘My Little Warhead’ and its logo had a nuclear rocket with a pink My Little Pony wig on. The idea was that you were flying around in a spaceship, controlling the sectors in much the same way as in the final game, with exactly the same structure but it was all futuristic. You had to fly a spaceship and do the combat with all this shit zapping around at the same time. That was the initial idea. I don’t remember the exact moment when we realised it was too hard – impossible really, for players to fly the spaceship while doing all this complicated management – but at some point the penny just dropped that the game needed simplifying. Mega lo Mania was called ‘My Little Warhead’ until six months before its release, when we changed it from spacemen to cavemen.Gary Penn: Why shift the setting from the far future to the distant past?
JH: It was me realising that what we were doing wasn’t working. We’d been using lots of placeholders and suddenly we needed proper art. In the back of my mind something was saying ‘NO!’ I can remember seeing Populous and those little cavemen. We usually ignored what everybody else was doing, but I saw this and thought it was a good idea. I thought we could start the game with cavemen then progress through Romans, Normans, the Middle Ages, the World Wars, the modern world, the future…GP: Dramatically that’s a much stronger sense of progression … So how would you summarise Mega lo Mania? Is it a god game? A real-time strategy game?
JH: I used to play a board game called Campaign with my dad. I think Mega lo Mania is based more on that than anything else. Instead of a country you’ve got a little sector and instead of cities you’ve got buildings…

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