When Kevin Toms created the first footie tactics simulation in the early days of the gaming industry, it became a phenomenon – and a source of cherished memories
When Kevin Toms created the first footie tactics simulation in the early days of the gaming industry, it became a phenomenon – and a source of cherished memories
If you were a football fan who owned a computer in the early 1980s, there is one game you will instantly recall. The box had an illustration of the FA Cup, and in the bottom right-hand corner was a photo of a smiling man with curly hair and a goatie beard. You’d see the same images in gaming magazines adverts – they ran for years because, despite having rudimentary graphics and very basic sounds, the game was an annual bestseller. This was Football Manager, the world’s first footie tactics simulation. The man on the cover was Kevin Toms, the game’s creator and programmer.
The story behind the game is typical for the whiz-kid era, when lone coders would bash out bestselling ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 titles in their bedrooms and then end up driving Ferraris around with the proceeds. As a child in the early 1970s, Toms was a huge football fan and an amateur game designer – only then it was board games, as no one had a computer at home. “When my parents went to see my careers master, I said: ‘Ask him if it’s possible to get a job as a games designer,’” says Toms. “He told them: ‘It’s a phase, he’ll grow out of it.’”
He didn’t. Throughout the 1970s, he worked as a programmer on corporate mainframes and for a while he was coding at the Open University. “It wasn’t long before I realised I could write games on these things,” he says. “Actually, the first game I made was on a programmable calculator.” In 1980, Toms bought a Video Genie computer, largely considered a clone of the TRS-80, one of the major early home micros. “I realised I could write the football manager board game I’d been trying to make for years on a computer,” he says. “There were two major advantages – it could calculate the league tables for me and I could work out an algorithm to arrange the fixtures.”
The Video Genie never took off – but then Toms bought a ZX81 with a 16k RAM extension and ported the game to that. “In January 1982, I placed a quarter-page ad in Computer and Video Games magazine and it started to take off,” he says. “I can still remember the first letter arriving with a cheque in it. In the first few months I sold 300 games.”
At this time, the game was extremely basic – there were no graphics, just text. Players picked a team from a selection of 16 and then had to act as its manager: buying players, deciding on a squad, then tweaking the side as it went through the season. You started at the bottom of the old fourth division and worked your way up.
