Kevin Toms

From the Speccy to Steam, the original Football Manager kicks off again

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Kevin Toms dusted down his original 1982 Football Manager game and released it on iOS and Android in 2016. Now he’s back with another faithful remake called Kevin Toms Football Star Manager, this time on Steam. Here Kevin tells us about the game which launched the football management genre and reflects on why it remains so well supported.

What originally inspired you to develop Football Manager in the early Eighties, Kevin?

It was originally conceived as a board game but when I became a professional computer programmer I realised I could put the two things together. The first home computer that caught my eye was the TRS-80 – I couldn’t afford one so I bought a clone called the Video Genie. I thought I could make a football manager game on it.

The game became particularly well known on the ZX80 and ZX81. When did you decide to port it?

It was a couple of months before I decided to launch the game on the TRS-80. The ZX81 had come out so I converted the game for the ZX81 with the 16K RAM. It was a good decision. In January 1982, I placed a quarter-page ad in Computer & Videogames magazine because everything was by mail order at that time. Within three or four months, I’d sold 300 games – 297 on the ZX81 and three on the TRS-80. Had I not created the ZX81 version, I’d have looked at the TRS-80 sales and probably said it wasn’t going to work.