It seems that what I tried to do in Sensible Soccer PLUS was actually done with the release in 1994 of Sensible World Of Soccer also known as SWOS. But not only adding teams from South America, but also from North America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. With all the National Teams and many official Championships from all over the world, including the most remote and obscure championships like the one in Vietnam for example, which have never appeared in any game in history.
The game also came with many improvements in graphics, audio, gameplay and the incredible Career mode, where you can also play as a Club Manager, buying/selling players, creating tactics, and even receiving offers to go work in other bigger clubs or even manage a National Team around the world, all this in addition to playing. It really is a complete game.
All of this made SWOS the best and most complete soccer game ever made, and that’s why we played this game for so many years and created the first organized SWOS Tournaments, and we continue to be an inspiration and reference for several SWOS Championships that have emerged since then, even today, decades after we started in 1993. I believe the most famous of these is Sensible Days, which has been held every year in Europe since 2004.
For more information, visit our old SWOS Brasil website below. (Very Old! For Desktop Only!)
How to further improve such a good game
But despite being an incredible game, there were still some problems, you couldn’t edit the teams in the game any more than the Custom Teams. And many teams, especially South American ones, didn’t have very accurate uniforms, and I wanted to fix them and also keep the teams more up to date, mainly so I could play with the best Brazilian Teams in the game. And this was my starting point.
So I edited all the teams I wanted from all over the world, adjusting the uniforms and updating the players, all in hexadecimal code. Yes, even the uniforms were edited in hexadecimal. I still have a notebook at home with each team and their uniforms written in hexadecimal. It was really a lot of work.
Then I had the idea, why not translate everything into Portuguese and really make a Brazilian version of the game? And in 1997 the first version of SWOS Brasil was ready.
A few years later I got SWOS 96/97, the last and best version of the SWOSseries, and SWOS Brasil had to be remade for this version as well. But the PC SWOS EDITOR 1.40 was also released in 1998, and with this incredible tool it became much easier to edit the teams, which helped me a lot with SWOS Brasil 1.5 in 2000.
But I still wasn’t satisfied, I had everything as a truly Brazilian game, everything adapted to Brazilian soccer terms, but during the matches we had a guy narrating the game in English… and that was really bothering me. I always wanted to change the sounds, I had already made some Frankenstein attempts since 1995 with narrations from different narrators and some even made by me, but there were some sounds that were “impossible” to change, and even searching all over the internet I could only see many people trying, and all failing. At the end of 2000 I finally had some free time and decided to face it alone, despite many warnings saying it was impossible.
It was really hard to do, I probably had more work than all the Mods I had ever done in my life combined, but I did it, and I did it perfectly. The result was really incredible for us, making the game much more fun than it already was for us Brazilians. And this became the final version of my Mod, SWOS Brasil 2.0, which was released in 2002 only on CD.
Although by the beginning of 2001 I had already figured out how to change everything perfectly, without crashes, to change all the sounds, I first needed to have a large database of sounds available to replace the originals, but they had to be from the same source, or they wouldn’t work properly together. So I waited until the 2002 World Cup, and for every Brazilian game, I recorded all the audio from the TV, always at the same volume and on the same channel, and of course with the same narrator and commentator. And of course, I chose the most famous duo in Brazil to work with, Galvão Bueno and Arnaldo César Coelho.
So I started filtering and separating cool phrases said by them in several files, and organizing them by type. I did this throughout the World Cup and after a month of work I had a great base of sounds to work with in my Mod. Then the work of replacing the sounds began with a lot of trial and error, and a lot of testing… I really mean A LOT OF TESTING! A detailed information about how I did all this explaining how anyone can do the same with their country was published HERE on our SWOS Brasil website where you can take a good look at how difficult this was to understand and build without bugs, as if it were actually an option in the game.
I was very proud to be able to publish the first entirely Brazilian football game, not only entirely in Portuguese, but also with Brazilian narration and commentary. Something that only happened again more than a decade later with the famous Bomba Patch here in Brazil. At that time the final version of SWOS Brasil was only released on CD because of its size, but only in 2007, SWOS Brasil 2.0 was published at Orkut for the first time in its full version for download.
