I’m the brains behind the Football Manager phenomenon… and it all started out of one-bed flat in Milton Keynes
THE man who took football into the computer age has gone back to basics.
Kevin Toms was the brains behind Football Manager — the groundbreaking game released in 1982 that gave fans a first chance to live out their dugout fantasies.
After a long break from the demands of an industry he pioneered, Toms returned.
And in a digital world where football and life in general have become swamped by information overload, he is finding a new audience for his unashamedly retro brand of entertainment.
Toms, 67, explained: “When I created he original Football Manager, we didn’t have the internet so I didn’t get the feedback you can get now.
“So although the game was selling well, I didn’t really realise its impact.
“I learned that only in recent years when I started going to retro gaming events and building up an online following.
“What I did first was put a message out saying, ‘I could rewrite the original game for mobile, is anybody interested?’ And I got a very positive reaction.”
Toms’ project — Kevin Toms Football * Manager — was a faithful, mobile-friendly recreation of the original game.
That was an unprecedented phenomenon he devised, programmed, marketed and distributed from a one-bed flat in Milton Keynes.
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Toms explained: “As a kid, I used to make football board games as a hobby. The one thing I wanted to crack was a management game. But it always had limitations.
“Then I became a professional computer programmer, working on big IBM mainframes and things like that for the Open University.
“The first home computers appeared and I realised I could put the two things together.”
Toms wrote Football Manager in 1981. He said: “I started to let friends play it and they seemed to become addicted.
“Then I started to think that there might be a market. It was all very new.
“There were no game publishers. You could only sell by mail order. So I made my own business, selling my own game.
“I was recording the cassettes in my flat while watching TV — listening to the buzzing noise — and when it finished I printed off two-colour covers and sent them out.”
Toms then began selling FM at computer game shows, where retailers would sometimes order ten copies. But, suddenly, his life changed . . .
He said: “WHSmith called me. I went to London and they ordered 2,000 units. That was equivalent to almost a year’s salary.
“A few weeks later, my girlfriend of the time called me and said we had another order from WHSmith.
“‘Already?’ ‘Yeah’. ‘How many?’ ‘A thousand’. ‘Fantastic, I’ll be able to give up the day job and do this full-time’.
“When I got home it turned out the order was for 10,000. Her maths wasn’t very good.”
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His Football Manager game went on to sell more than two million copies.
Toms ploughed much of the proceeds into founding his own company, Addictive Games, that also released non-football titles.
But he found that he preferred writing games to managing a business, so sold Addictive to Prism Leisure in 1987.
Though giving up creative and logistical control proved to be a mistake. Toms admitted: “It stopped being fun.
“Football Manager 2 was not a bad game but it was done under a lot of pressure.
“It was a stressful, tough experience. My code was in all 35 versions — seven platforms, five different languages.
“It drained me. I did the World Cup one which was even worse. By that time the relationship . . . what’s the expression? . . . there were artistic differences.”
Toms left Prism in 1991 and became a freelance programmer.
He lived and worked all over the world — New Zealand, Canada and Europe — with clients including the European Space Agency, IBM and City of London banks.
Toms, who continued to follow the fortunes of Torquay United and Bournemouth from afar, said: “Sometimes people who had played Football Manager became my boss.”
He slowly came to understand just how big the impact of his original game had been.
The mobile app industry has given him the chance to invent, produce and distribute his new creations as a one-man band — just like the old days.
It’s like reading a novel. You are reading words on a page but you experience a lot more than that. It’s in your imagination.
And, later this month, he will release the third version of his latest project, Kevin Toms Football Game 2.
It will have a number of new features and continue to be updated — but always trying to avoid the slow-paced, statistic-drenched approach of Football Manager’s legion of imitators and successors.
Toms, now retired from his day job and living in Amsterdam, said: “I feel that it’s got a bit complicated, too much like work.
“You don’t have to simulate everything and display everything. Like the original game, my new projects are text-based.
“It’s like reading a novel. You are reading words on a page but you experience a lot more than that. It’s in your imagination.
“The more complex versions are for a certain group who like all that detail. But there are plenty that don’t.
“They want something accessible that they can pick up and come back to later.
“Nearly everyone who watches a team has opinions on how it should be done.
“The reason for creating Football Manager was the same as now — to give those people a chance to live that out and have fun doing it.”
- Kevin Toms Football * Manager and Kevin Toms Football Game 2 are available from app stores. Version 3 of KTFG 2 is released later this month. For more information, visit https://kevintoms.games/