Games from the Past: Episode 1 – Cannon Fodder (1993)
The title screen said it all. A lone poppy. Richard Joseph’s gentle, melancholic theme — “War! Never Been So Much Fun” — playing quietly underneath. Before you’d pressed a single button, Cannon Fodder had already told you something unusual about itself: this was a game about war that didn’t think war was fun at all.
Sensible Software released Cannon Fodder in 1993, first on the Amiga and then across what felt like every platform with a pulse — Mega Drive, SNES, DOS, CD32, Atari Jaguar. It looked like a toy. Tiny cartoon soldiers, bright green hills, little puffs of smoke when things exploded. It played like something much more serious.
What It Was
Cannon Fodder was a top-down military action game in which you commanded a squad of soldiers through increasingly brutal missions — destroying enemy bases, rescuing hostages, wiping out everything that moved. The controls were simple: point and click to move, hold fire to shoot, manage your squad’s formation. The execution was anything but.
What made it different from every other game of its type was the soldiers. They had names. Jools, Jops, Stoo, Hicks, Jude — absurd, mundane, British names that appeared on screen every mission. And when they died, which they did constantly and without ceremony, their names were carved onto the gravestones at Boot Hill. The cemetery grew. Every mission you survived added more stone to that hill.
Nobody had done that before. Nobody had made you feel the weight of a tiny pixelated casualty. It was a design decision so small and so devastating that it changed the entire experience of playing the game.
The Controversy
Cannon Fodder arrived in the UK accompanied by outrage. The Royal British Legion objected strongly to the use of a poppy — a symbol of remembrance for the war dead — on the packaging of a game whose tagline was “War! Never Been So Much Fun.” The Sun ran a campaign against it. Questions were asked about taste and decency.
The irony was profound and seemingly lost on everyone doing the objecting. Jon Hare, Sensible Software’s co-founder, had made an anti-war game. The poppy wasn’t there to trivialise the dead — it was there for exactly the same reason it’s worn in November. The soldiers at Boot Hill were the point. The whole thing was the point. The tagline was deliberately uncomfortable, deliberately satirical. You were supposed to feel the contradiction.
The controversy sold a lot of copies and probably introduced the game to people who’d never have found it otherwise. Whether that’s ironic or just how things work is a question for another day.
Why It Still Matters
Cannon Fodder is one of the few games from its era that was trying to say something. Not in a heavy-handed, cutscene-laden way — in the way it was designed. The named soldiers weren’t a gimmick. They were a mechanic that created emotional investment in losses that other games would have counted as statistics.
You learned, quickly, that sending your whole squad charging in was a death sentence. You learned to value cover, to move carefully, to use the terrain. Not because the game told you to — because Jools had just taken a rocket to the face and you’d known Jools since mission three and you weren’t ready to see his name on that hill.
That’s remarkable game design. It produces an emotional response through systems rather than story — which is exactly what the best games do, and exactly what most war games then and now completely ignore in favour of spectacle.
The gameplay itself holds up better than you might expect. The controls feel slightly dated — it was built for the Amiga mouse and the console ports varied in quality — but the mission design remains clever, the difficulty curve is well-judged, and the chaos of a mission going wrong is still genuinely tense. Cannon Fodder 2, released in 1994, refined the formula further and is arguably the better game, but the original is where the idea lived in its purest form.
Where to Play It Now
Cannon Fodder has never had an official modern re-release, which is a genuine shame. The Amiga version remains the definitive one — faster, better-looking, and with the mouse controls it was designed for. The THEA500 Mini doesn’t include it in its built-in library, but it can be loaded via USB if you track down the appropriate files.
GOG and Steam don’t have it. The Evercade library doesn’t currently include it. If Sensible Software’s back catalogue ever gets a proper digital release — and there’s no good reason it shouldn’t — Cannon Fodder would be the flagship title. Until then, emulation is the practical route, with the Amiga version in WinUAE on PC being the closest to the intended experience.
It’s worth the effort to find. There are games that feel important because they were technically impressive, or commercially huge, or culturally ubiquitous. Cannon Fodder feels important because it was honest about something most games in its genre weren’t, and did it through design rather than dialogue. Thirty years on, that’s still rare enough to be worth noting.
Exploring the Amiga library? Our Best Retro Computers 2026 guide covers the THEA500 Mini and original hardware options. For more classic game retrospectives, see the Retro & Arcade section.