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 going to make me money. “It was called the Video Genie and it was much cheaper than the TRS-80,” he explains. Then, in the early 1980s, he spotted a TRS-80 clone while walking down Tottenham Court Road. You could find nice ways to deal with results using the different strengths of the teams, but a match list is complex and leaderboards are time consuming.”īy the late 1970s, Toms had already had a brush with computers, creating a simple game of Battleships on one of the first programmable calculators. “I found it frustrating because certain things were very clunky. But merging the sport into board game form was proving difficult. I love football, although as a Torquay United fan I am used to suffering!” he smiles. Undeterred, Toms continued with his main project, a combination of two of his loves.

“He said it was a phase and he would get over it eventually.” “I asked them to ask him if it was possible to get a job as a board game designer.” The inevitable answer came back. “When I was 15, my parents had to see the master’s degree in school,” he says. “So I thought a computer could do that too.”įrom a young age, Toms dreamed of having a career in tabletop gaming. “I already had the idea for the board game,” explains Toms. “At the ZX shows, I had to constantly explain to them that it was a soccer management game, and they’d be like, ‘oh, that’s fine.'” Often mistaken for some kind of weird text adventure, it was an abstruse concept to many, but not to its author. “Conceptually, it was very different from most games,” he tells me over Skype. But today is different, because in 1982, Kevin Toms not only created a blockbuster game, he invented an entirely new genre.

Over the past 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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