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

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]

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] Toms currently resides in the Netherlands.

Circa 2003, Toms created an online football management game called New Zealand Football Championship Manager based on New Zealand's national league and as of 2010 was working on a new football manager style game for the iPhone.[3] In August 2015, Toms began rewriting the original 1982 Football Manager game for mobile devices after pitching the idea to his followers, drawing on his work experience of business app development.[7][8] The new game, Football Star* Manager (KTFSM), was released in 2016 to an overwhelmingly positive response from buyers – many of them former players of the original Football Manager series. KTFSM was first released on iOS and Android; since its release, the game has been ported to macOS, Windows 10 and Amazon Fire. The game is as near to the original Football Manager as you can get on the new platforms.[7]

In January 2022, Kevin launched a Kickstarter to fund a new version of his Football Manager game, Football New Manager, to mark the 40th anniversary of the original game [9] It was renamed Kevin Toms Football Game and released in 2023.[10]

Releases

References

  1. 1 2 3 Interview with Kevin at Ready64.org
  2. ↑ "Designer of the month". Computer & Video Games (34): 25. August 1984.
  3. 1 2 3 4 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. 1 2 "Kevin Toms Blog".
  8. ↑ Andrew speaks to Kevin Toms, author of the first Football Manager – Saturday Sport on Coast and County Radio, retrieved 2021-08-03
  9. ↑ "Kickstarter for the new game".
  10. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqr2-uVgJ4w
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