The term ‘squeaky bum time’ may have been coined by Alex Ferguson during the 2003 Premiership title run-in, but it couldn’t be a more appropriate one for a game made some two decades before. Addictive Games’ Football Manager wasn’t just the template from which all future stat-crunching management titles would draw their inspiration, it also had a special ingredient that others failed to capture: the capacity to make you squirm in your seat as the shots rained in.
It’s often said that the most emotional aspect of the beautiful game for a manager standing on the touchline comes from willing the ball to cross the opponent’s goal line. The tactics have been established, substitutions made and team talk delivered – now it’s up to the players and blind fate. And whether it’s a Sunday pub league game or the European Cup Final, managers kick every ball and block every shot.
Judged by these standards, the original Football Manager on Sinclair’s 48K ZX Spectrum was a simulation par excellence. Willing the ball to cross the line – albeit a rudimentary white stripe on a flat green background – was one of the most emotional experiences to be had in home computing in the early ’80s.
Football Manager was the brainchild of Kevin Toms, then a professional computer programmer working with mainframe systems. He had always taken a keen interest in games of all forms. “Even when I was a teenager I loved inventing games – both board games and ball games,” he recalls. “I remember inventing a game called throwball, where you had to throw the ball from one side of the road to the other and try to hit the kerb at an angle so you would score points. The ball had to hit the angle of the kerb before hitting the road. Years later, I saw people still playing it. But today’s traffic would probably ruin it!”
For Toms, the evolution from designing ball games to hand-crafted pen-and-paper games to computer simulations was a natural one. “I love football, and I had invented several football management board games, but I could see what more I could do with a computer. Getting my hands on microcomputers gave me the opportunity to build it. I first got the idea from a programmable calculator. This was a very simple game, based on Battleships.”
Like most game coders in the early ’80s, Toms started programming as a fun experiment, showing the results to friends as he went along. The early text version of Football Manager was written on both a ZX81 and TRS-80 and then converted to the ZX Spectrum in a couple of months. Toms recalls that his friends were so gripped by the early prototypes that he struggled to keep them off his keyboard, which gave rise to the name of his company, Addictive Games.
But when it came to fitting everything into the Spectrum’s limited memory he decided to use BASIC rather than assembler. “I wrote it in BASIC because being a strategy game it needed the maths and logic that BASIC provided. Assembler would have been too slow and clunky and would have constricted the design process. The graphics, when I added them in for the Spectrum, used the machine’s Boolean logic and it was fiddly, but again memory compact.”
Working nights and weekends, Toms disregarded the graphical side of the game until he’d refined the strategy and inter-relation of the tactical decision making. It was important to him that even without any visuals the game had an emotional centre. “The text version of the match was simple – you waited to see if goals were going to be scored. But I understood how to create the tension and excitement; you never knew quite what was going to happen, you could not predict when it ended. And the way you had set things up – your team compared to the opponents – strongly affected things. Despite that, you could never be sure of winning, as in real football. I think the way such things are balanced is the art of game design.”
But introducing graphics didn’t come without some concerns. “I wanted to create all of those emotional effects and still maintain the integrity of the gameplay. The key to it was ensuring nothing was predetermined. As the players passed the ball around, decisions were being made. There were huge limitations technically – very limited memory, very limited graphics – so creating the feel of reality was part of it, with what were just stick men. Then it was about making them do intelligent things – making radical design decisions to work within the limitations that were there – and binding it all into the game.”
It was the combination of the hidden calculations and the graphical match highlights – much celebrated in 1982, somewhat derided now – that gave rise to the game’s emotional core. Watching as your striker moved into the penalty box, pausing for what seemed an age, then shooting desperately wide could result in much gnashing of teeth. When the game’s popularity was at its peak, anecdotes were thrown around of young men breaking keyboards, tapes, even their own toes.
As a 1982 release, Football Manager hardly pushed Sinclair’s hardware to its limits, presenting a plain green expanse with white lines to indicate the dimensions of the pitch, and stick men flickering across it. And though the ball was square, the animation rudimentary and the goal posts unrealistically spaced, it didn’t seem to matter. Football Manager had an emotional pull that converted many kids, not to mention their dads, to the home computing craze.
The strategic options were minimal by today’s standards, but, for the era, they presented an enduring level of depth. But how much of this depth was due to real calculations and how much down to mere perception? “In the case of the original Football Manager I tried to create a range of possible strategies and tactics within a limited number of resources,” explains Toms. “There was still plenty of scope once I had created player skills, energy, morale, injuries and the attributes of your opponents. All of these things interplayed with each other, and I spent plenty of time refining the design. But it was at the design stage that I set the pattern of the interaction between the various attributes.”
Football Manager creator Kevin Toms.
With just three positions – defence, midfield and attack – and two player attributes – skill and energy – players could understand the nuances of the game almost instantly. But conquering it was another matter, and the lack of tactical options allowed Toms to place a greater emphasis on risk versus reward. Players could deal on the transfer market, of course, with top signings costing as much as £25,000, but an inability to have much in the way of a roster of players, plus an aggressive attitude to injuries, saw many games played with just nine players on the pitch.
“But this was my favourite feature and it was the most effective one,” defends Toms. “The way that the combination of loss of energy and risk of injury meant that you couldn’t always play your best players and you needed to rest them. This closely matches real life, and adds a lot of fun and strategies to the game.”
Football Manager was a far cry from the hand-holding ego-massaging simulations Toms decries in the modern-day equivalents. With four leagues and seven skill levels there was plenty of scope, but many found even getting into the old first division a struggle. Others accused the game of outright cheating. But they were only correct on this last point on the hardest difficulty, where CPU teams had player attributes which simply couldn’t be achieved by the player.
“Really, it’s all about maths and logic,” says Toms about the game’s depth despite its limitations. “The art is taking real things and simulating them without the real physics. It is finding maths that gives the right effect. I think strategy comes about through the factors you choose to include in the strategy, and the way we choose to blend and balance them. The football management game has a fairly standardised format these days, which I like to think I have some credit for inventing. I still believe there is a big variety in how you can implement it. Even within that format there is still plenty of scope for invention.”
Toms still receives emails about the game today, something he says surprises him. Fans say they used to play the game for eight solid hours. Some send him photos of themselves playing the game in their bedrooms. Others jokingly refer to the failed exams or curtailed social lives they experienced because of Football Manager’s unique pull. “The nostalgia takes me back,” says Toms. “I meet a lot of people in daily life who seem to have been influenced by the game, or at least enjoyed it. And that is reward in itself.”
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