This packaging was designed by me for when the game was accepted into WH Smith for sale. The picture of the cup with the two players around it came out of my imagination as did the Addictive logo with the lightning bolt and the choice of red and yellow. I chose the typeface for “Football [...]
Filed under: Addictive Games, Football Manager, Kevin Toms, The 80s | Leave a Comment »
The BBC micro had an interesting difference. Not enough memory for Football Manager except in mode 7 Teletext mode. But the only graphics in mode 7 of use were characters made of 2 by 3 block pixels. Many Teletext images were made out of these blocky characters. But on the BBC, to create the match [...]
Filed under: Addictive Games, Football Manager, The 80s | Leave a Comment »
Not easy to describe this. But it was important. Important to making it work, to making it succeed. I decided the setting, the football league, 4 divisions, plus a knockout cup, the FA Cup. I decided on what attributes your players would have. I decided what you could control. Then I pieced together the game [...]
Filed under: Addictive Games, Football Manager, Games Design, Software Development and Delivery, The 80s | Leave a Comment »
30 years ago, the ZX81 game was doing well, the TRS80 Football Manager not so much. Then Sinclair came out with the Spectrum. So, I spent a busy couple of months enhancing the game. And one of the things I decided to do was add goal mouth action. So I got busy designing animated footballers [...]
Filed under: Addictive Games, Football Manager, Games Design, Software Development and Delivery, The 80s | Leave a Comment »
So what was it that made the original Football Manager catch on so well, and what can I do now? Well since I wrote it, I know a lot about what made the original tick. I know I made it very playable, very enjoyable, and it had a pace that kept people playing it. I [...]
Filed under: Football Manager, Games Design, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, The 80s | 3 Comments »
So I launched it on to the market in January 1982. But before that of course, I wrote it. I bought a Video Genie to write it on. The Video Genie was a Tandy TRS80 clone. It was cheaper, but still expensive for me at the time. But, I believed that I would be successful [...]
Filed under: Addictive Games, Football Manager, Games Design, Kevin Toms, Software Development and Delivery, Software development tools, The 80s | Leave a Comment »
It’s worth putting that headline in caps. It was January 1982 that the first advert for Football Manager (my original game) appeared on the newstands in Computer and Video Games magazine. 30 years on, that foundation game has grown into a genre of computer games. My original game was very playable, and very popular, spending [...]
Filed under: Addictive Games, Football Manager, Games Design, Kevin Toms, The 80s | Leave a Comment »
You know, the little stick men running around in the original Football Manager on the Spectrum. Sometimes people ask if the animation was a fixed set, or even believe it was. Well no, it wasn’t, there was an infinite number of possibilities of what could happen and the individual players were making decisions moment by [...]
Filed under: Addictive Games, Football Manager, Games Design, Kevin Toms, Software Development and Delivery, The 80s | 1 Comment »
Lots of people are interested in the era I was part of, the 80s when the games industry was so new, not even a retail outlet to be found at first. It was a great time, nobody knew what they were doing, just learning as they go, and the business men were also coders. A [...]
Filed under: Addictive Games, Football Manager, The 80s | 1 Comment »
Next week I will be developing the game further, I am looking forward to it. Whilst in the UK, it’s been good to meet a number of former players too, and reconnect with those times. Seeing plenty of old computers at the Vintage Computer Club was also quite nostalgic. Time just drops away looking at [...]
Filed under: Addictive Games, The 80s | Leave a Comment »
