Kevin Toms

Kevin Toms (born 22, April 1957 in Paignton) is a British video game designer who founded Addictive Games and created the original Football Manager, a simulation game released in the early 1980s. It included a portrait of his bearded face on publicity material and cassette covers.[2]

Kevin Toms
Born (1957-04-22) 22 April 1957
Paignton, United Kingdom[1]
NationalityBritish
OccupationVideo game designer
Known forFootball Manager
Addictive Games

Life and career

Toms worked as a professional computer programmer for large companies in the late 1970s and early 1980s.[1] He developed games in his spare time, taking over a year to create the original versions of his Football Manager game for the TRS-80 and ZX81. Toms began selling these versions by mail order in 1982 through advertisements placed in computer magazines using the name Addictive Games.[3] The game became a big success, particularly after being ported to the ZX Spectrum, and began to be stocked by high street stores. When the stores ordered thousands of copies, Toms quit his day job to run Addictive Games.[1][3] Football Manager was ported to a wide variety of systems (there were sixteen different versions by 1987). Between 1982 and 1987, Toms ran the company which published a number of games by other programmers as well as new games from Toms, Software Star and President.[4] Toms then sold Addictive to Prism Leisure Corporation, although he still created two more versions of Football Manager for them; Football Manager 2 and Football Manager World Cup Edition.[5]

Toms returned to corporate work and moved to New Zealand to work as a software architect for large companies.[3] By 2018, he had relocated to Canada.[6]

Circa 2003, Toms created an online football management game called New Zealand Football Championship Manager based on New Zealand's national league and is currently working on a new football manager style game for the iPhone.[3] The game's title is Football star Manager which is available on IOS and Android and is as near to the original Football manager as you can get on the new platforms [7].

Releases
gollark: Ah yes, it does say that it needs 5. No idea what the threshold would be before people do anything.
gollark: And nobody is going to globally implement ridiculous filtering things.
gollark: I mean, nobody is going to have a different version of all the products they sell with a different OS for one random state.
gollark: I don't think this is actually possible, yes.
gollark: All in accordance with my plan.

References
  1. Interview with Kevin at Ready64.org
  2. "Designer of the month". Computer & Video Games (34): 25. August 1984.
  3. Interview with Kevin for the blog The Ball is Round
  4. "The den of Geek interview: Kevin Toms".
  5. Retro Gamer Magazine, issue 63. Desert Island Disk: Kevin Toms (pages 80-85)
  6. "Match Highlights made in.. 4 countries!". Kevin Toms Blog. 5 November 2017. Retrieved 21 July 2018.
  7. "Kevin Toms Blog".


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