8024/20965
I was in WH Smiths in Middlesbrough in maybe 1983 or 1984 when I picked up a cartridge box that would change my life and which my mum feared would mean I would fail my O levels (8As, a B and a C - so it might have been responsible for that poor result in Additional Maths). It was Kevin Tom's Football Manager for the Acorn Electron. Yes, my family chose the Betamax of home computer systems.
I remember Kevin's happy face staring out at me from the box and I don't know if I knew anything about the game beforehand, but I knew I had to have it. Other kids might have wanted a computer game where they actually played football, but I loved statistics more than kicking and loved watching results come up on Ceefax more than watching any action and knew I'd never be a footballer, but maybe I could be a manager.
I'd played endless games of Subbuteo against myself and had all the results and tables logged in a red folder. I couldn't even flick to kick and whatever team I supported in real life would win everything, but still, it wasn't a waste of time. Other kids might like playing outside on bikes or with other humans or trying to have sex with someone, but I liked being in the dining room on my own, playing a table football game on top of my snooker board, very badly and then writing down the scores. It was stuff like this that helped me hang on to my precious virginity until I was weeks away from my 20th birthday. So thanks Ian Subbuteo.
And thanks to Kevin Toms for that too and I am sure many other virginal 1980s teenagers would like to thank him too. Because his game gave me all the excitement of managing a football team, watching the results come up in graphics only and most importantly not being able to cheat so my team always won. I renamed teams after my friends and steered York City to the first division (on one of the lower levels) and played for fucking hours at a time. It was thrilling.
Eventually my Acorn Electron would commit suicide whilst my friend Phil Fry was playing Defender on it. It wasn't Phil's fault. I think the computer had believed the lie that, if we bought it, I would use it to learn coding and not just play games on it. But I only played games. Sometimes I would type in code from a book which would supposedly mean you could play more games, but any error in typing meant that it didn't work and I think all those games were shit anyway.
So tapes of games was the only way to go and Football Manager was my absolute favourite and still is (with some competition from Civilisation II). I went for years not being able to play it any more but then Kevin Toms put up a version that you could play on your phone and I go back to it again and again. My last attempt lasted over 150 seasons and I only stopped because I finally decided to try level 6 (out of 7) and started to get relegated again.
Anyway, my job has given me the rare privilege of meeting and chatting with many of my heroes and where possible thanking them for the pleasure they have given me. And I was able to do that today as I was talking to Kevin (remotely, as he's in Amsterdam) about the Football Manager game and
his book about the experience for next week's Book Club.
His hair may be a little whiter (it's possible that mine has a touch of grey too) but he is still very recognisably the face from that box from 40+ years ago. I hadn't appreciated that Kevin invented this style of game (there might have been a few text based games - I remember playing a very unsatisfying choose your own adventure style one, where there were riddles where you had to get the wording of the answer exactly right) of taking on some kind of job and not having to shoot anything or get through a maze (except the maze of the fixture list) and like me he'd had the experience of knowing what he wanted to do at school (design board games in his case) and the careers advisor telling him that that wasn't an option. He also played lots of Subbuteo, but against other people, the loser.
He sold millions of copies of his game, though it sounds like he blew all the cash, but no doubt had fun doing so, but he's still living his dream and still coming up with ideas for his most famous game. I briefly had a stint of playing Football Manager on Twitch during lockdown and had the bizarre experience of the creator of the game dropping by to watch. It was a decently exciting spectator sport for the couple of hundred nerds who turned up. I hoped Kevin could give me some hints as to how to conquer level 6, but it sounds like he has no more idea than me. He created AI years before anyone else and Football Manager is alive and no one can defeat it.
Football Manager is in many ways a very simple game, especially when compared to the Football Manager games that have come since, but I never got on with them because they were too fussy and complex and the original has surprising depths, as anyone who watched those heady fights on Twitch will attest.
A pleasant way to spend a lunchtime and I am not the only person who has told him how much that game meant to me as a kid (and let's face it, an only slightly less nerdy and socially awkward adult). I am sure he helped scupper a few O level results, but if those kids were anything like me they'd have found other monotonous and weird things to do to fill those gaping empty days of the 1980s when there really was nothing better to do.
A great RHLSTP with a rejuvenated James Acaster went up today.
Listen here.
