In 1982 I lived in England.
In 1982 I launched Football Manager
In 1982 the New Zealand team was coached by Kevin Fallon
In 1982 New Zealand reached the World Cup Finals
In 2009 I am living in New Zealand
In 2009 for the first time since 1982, New Zealand have qualified for the World Cup Finals
In 2009 the winning goal score was Rory Fallon
In 1982 Rory Fallon was born
Rory Fallon is the son of Kevin Fallon
Read Blowing away Rugby’s Dark Cloud!
1982 to 2009 World Cup New Zealand Coincidence
November 14, 2009 — Kevin TomsHistoric Football Manager ZX Spectrum Video
November 14, 2009 — Kevin TomsI just added a historic Football Manager Spectrum video to my Facebook page. Absorbing for me to watch. Calm, quiet commentary, a little bit of crackle on the sound.
Celtic, Rangers and the Premier League
November 13, 2009 — Kevin TomsThis has been rejected by the Premier League. It is something that often comes up. No other clubs besides these 2 have won the Scottish League for 24 years! Basically, it’s like having Chelsea and Manchester United permanently playing in League One. When you realise that, you have to have sympathy with the Old Firm. There’s a lack of real competition and a lack of revenue.
It’s a problem for all of the big clubs across Europe. They are all businesses, and their aim is to make the maximum profit. They get that most by playing other big teams. So the best thing for their success and prosperity is a European league of the big clubs and to leave their national competitions. Celtic and Rangers would join that in an instant. But there is a problem that comes from this..
..It’s the problem that afflicts the Premier League. Once you get into that top competition your club makes the most money and gets bigger. And the same is true for the other 19 clubs. So you have 20 successful businesses together and if they leave that league they will lose a lot of money. So much so that the Premier League provides parachute payments to soften the blow.
So what is the problem then? The teams inside the Premier League want to pull up the ladder and keep the competition for themselves, banning promotion and relegation. Of course they want that, it is best for their businesses. But it is not best for Football. It’s only the Football Association and FIFA that are preventing this happening. The clubs would do it given the chance. Probably a closed Premier League, then a European League, then a World League. And only the top clubs in it and barriers to entry from smaller clubs.
Promotion and relegation is what makes league competitions so much fun, and it needs to be preserved. Without relegation from top leagues the top clubs will become slack because they have nothing to fear.
But, maybe a real European League, as the next step above the National Leagues, with promotion and relegation, is the way the future will go.
Intense Game Development
November 5, 2009 — Kevin TomsGame development goes through phases.
There’s a discovery phase, when you are trying out ideas, to see if they will work. No matter how much you visualise how a game is going to work, it’s impossible to picture everything that happens until you have a prototype to test. Then you are trying to see if your ideas are as fun as you thought they would be.
It’s a choice how many new things you are trying. The more there are, the longer the discovery phase takes, as you try to prove all the new ideas. One of things that delays delivery is too many new things being developed at once. Against that, is the fact that innovation is needed, and lots of new things can make a game attractive.
Once you pass the discovery phase, and the basics work, you need to expand and flesh out the game. So then, you are creating the game enviroment, the background, the components that add to the realism of the experience. This is a more linear task, more predictable.
Not long after comes a crunch of activity. Now the picture is clear, you know what you are creating, and it’s just intense work to pull it all together, to add and add to the game.
– That’s the phase I am in now!
What’s in my new Football Manager game?
October 28, 2009 — Kevin TomsI’ve been thinking about this. It would be good to talk about it a bit. Certainly it’s intended to be suited to the iPhone, and it’s got a bit of retro about it. It ties back to the original Football Manager game I wrote for the ZX81 and then Spectrum. So it’s not complicated! 
But, that is what I want, that is how I want it to be. Of course, the tricky part is making it fun. That is where most of my effort goes. Another reason for keeping it simple is the iPhone itself. It’s small, the screen is small and you cannot get much on it. There is no keyboard and control needs to be straightforward. This is another area of design I am working on.
I have set a launch date that I am working to. So the pressure is on!
Daily Record have wiped me out of history!
October 24, 2009 — Kevin TomsI was sent this article to look at. I was amazed to read the following excerpts:
“It’s all a far cry from the first version of the game, developed by the Everton-mad Collyer brothers Oliver and Paul, which launched in 1982 for the late, lamented ZX Spectrum computer.
Players in those days simply picked a team in the Fourth Division of English football and tried to work their work up the leagues. It was an instant hit and was named Strategy Game of theYear in 1983.
Five years later, the second in Football Manager appeared, with better graphics and the ability to choose formations, training and substitutions. By this time, the game was on the Atari ST, Amiga, Commodore 64 and Amstrad computers.
The game morphed into Championship Manager in 1992 and is still known as “Champ Man” by many fans. But in 2004, the Collyers’ company Sports Interactive teamed up with Sega and the latter-day version of Football Manager was born the following year.”
It’s simply not true!!! The Collyer brothers had nothing to do with the Football Manager written by me and launched in 1982.
The truth is I wrote Football Manager in 1981. I launched Addictive Games to sell it in January 1982. I wrote and launched the Spectrum version in 1982. I won the Strategy Game of the Year award. I wrote Football Manager 2 a few years later. The games were number 1 sellers, sold in the millions, and I am credited with founding the genre of Football Manager style games.
Yet the Daily Record have written this obviously with either not checking the accuracy of what they are saying or even possibly deliberately writing me out of the history of the game genre I started!
Help!!!!!!
Simple Games Design for iPhone
October 14, 2009 — Kevin TomsIt’s been a few years since the most popular games were simple straightforward games. In the genre I am best known for, Football Manager games, even more so. Over time the games have got more and more complex.
But the iPhone is disrupting the pattern. It’s hard to play a complex game on the iPhone. It is a small device, and many people use it for casual relaxation. It’s not the best device for hardcore games. The market for games on the iPhone is evolving fast. Nobody knows what is going to work long term. With every successful game on the iPhone comes an examination of what makes it successful. This is so that people can work out what they need to do to make theirs successful
In Design, as well as Games Design, simplicity that works is the hardest to achieve, – harder than complexity. Simplicity being harder to achieve than complexity is not intuitive. If you look around at design however, you will notice that the most successful designs are surprisingly simple. – Or at least they seem to be when you look at them after they are done.
The Mona Lisa smile is not difficult for an artist to paint. But, to create it the first time?
Donations – why?
October 8, 2009 — Kevin TomsIt took me a long time to decide to add donations to my website. But, I am an independent games developer like many others, and it seemed a good idea. Why is it a good idea? To make money? – That is only a distant possibility. What finally triggered me was listening to Richard Stallman talking on the radio about funding creative people. He described how good it would be if, when we liked something, a piece of music, a book, or computer games, etc, that we could then send $1 to the author. Not to a corporation, a record company, a publisher, just direct to the author.
It’s certainly what I would like to do when I like something. But he also highlighted that there is no infrastructure, no way to do it, no way to get the money through. What is needed is some kind of donations account which you can use easily with accessible creative artist identities so you can choose who you are donating to, and do so cheaply.
As far as I can see Paypal donations is the best way currently to do so. Until someone creates a donations bank that is the best there is. So now I am in the system, I am taking donations to fund me to continue writing more games 
Software Development – avoiding trouble
September 17, 2009 — Kevin TomsIf you were on a journey, and you had to go through a town. But, you knew the town was full of roadworks and detours, you would try and find a simple way through. Why take the complicated way, when you could take the simple route? Seems obvious right? But, when developers are writing software they often ignore the complexity they can see. There are signs in front of them that what they about to start writing is full of problems. – Complexity, potential road blocks, uncertainty. Yet they steam straight ahead, why?
It’s because all those problems in software are intellectual challenges. Every problem requires coming up with a solution, and so they want to do it, for the satisfaction of beating all the problems.
But there is a price. If you took the complex, difficult road route to your destination, you would arrive later, and you don’t want to. So you find a simpler way. And equally writing complex software instead of choosing the simple way, has the same effect, you arrive later. And in this case the destination is delivery of the software, finishing it, which gets delayed.
I have led teams of developers where I had in my team people who wanted to make the software more complex, just for the challenge it gave them. Great fun for them if I let them, but hazardous for the people waiting for the product.
I have a maxim that the quickest way to deliver software is don’t write it! If it’s complex, find a better way, there nearly always is one that does 90% of the same functionality for 50% of the effort.
Playing Football Manager Now! – and comments from people
September 8, 2009 — Kevin TomsPeople comment from time to time on the Play Football Manager now part of the blog. They tell me what they think of Football Manager, and playing it still. I often get emails about it too. It’s good, well actually it’s bloody wonderful, to get such positive feedback, and still be getting it. It is encouraging, and very much encouraging me to write more games. I have chosen to do that, independently, not an easy path. But, there are many others doing the same thing. I still get a kick out coming up with games design ideas and components and seeing them work.
I have in mind, as I write, what people will get out of it, and why it will be fun. It takes programming, design, and tuning to get the right results. in fact, it takes many of the skills that I have, and that is much of the appeal of doing it.
