Over the last ten years, I’ve interviewed many of my childhood heroes – those talented coders I used to read about in the pages of Crash or Your Sinclair. But today is different, because back in 1982, not only did Kevin Toms create a smash hit game, he invented a whole new genre.
“Conceptually, it was very different to most games,” he explains to me via Skype. “At ZX shows, I had to constantly explain it was a football management game, and they’d go, ‘oh, okay’.” Often confused for some sort of weird text adventure, it was an abstruse concept for many – but not its author. “I already had the idea for the board game,” explains Toms. “So I just thought a computer could do that, too.”
From a young age, Toms harboured dreams of having a career in tabletop games. “When I was 15, my parents had to see the careers master at school,” he says. “I asked them to ask him if it was possible to get a job as a board game designer.” The inevitable reply came back. “He said it was a phase and that I’d grow out of it.”
Undeterred, Toms continued with his main project, a combination of two of his loves. “I’m a football fan. I love football, although as a Torquay United fan, I’m used to suffering!” he grins. But fusing the sport into board game form was proving tricky. “I found it frustrating because certain things were very clunky. You could come up with nice ways to deal with results using the different strengths of the teams, but a fixture list is complex, and league tables are time-consuming to work out.”