“When I got the computer home, I quickly realised the deficiencies of the board game could be eliminated – the computer could do all the calculations.” In 1981, using the BASIC programming language, Toms recreated his pen and paper management game on the Video Genie. The switch from table to CPU was inspired. My girlfriend at the time said it was a waste of money – I said, no, this is gonna make me money.” “It was called the Video Genie, and it was way cheaper than the TRS-80,” he explains. Then, in the early 80s, he spotted a TRS-80 clone while strolling in Tottenham Court Road. 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.”īy the late 70s, Toms had already experienced a brush with computers, creating a simple Battleships game on an early programmable calculator. “I found it frustrating because certain things were very clunky. But fusing the sport into board game form was proving tricky. I love football, although as a Torquay United fan, I’m used to suffering!” he grins. Undeterred, Toms continued with his main project, a combination of two of his loves. “He said it was a phase and that I’d grow out of it.” “I asked them to ask him if it was possible to get a job as a board game designer.” The inevitable reply came back. “When I was 15, my parents had to see the careers master at school,” he says.
“So I just thought a computer could do that, too.”įrom a young age, Toms harboured dreams of having a career in tabletop games. “I already had the idea for the board game,” explains Toms.
“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. “Conceptually, it was very different to most games,” he explains to me via Skype. But today is different, because back in 1982, not only did Kevin Toms create a smash hit game, he invented a whole new genre. 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.
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