Elegant Chaos

When Sports Interactive parted company with Eidos, SI cleverly managed to walk away with all the code and all the data for the Championship Manager series.

What Eidos did take away was the name and the look and feel, so we basically had to come up with a new name and redesign the user interface - thus Football Manager was born.

I was delighted with this turn of events, as ever since joining SI I'd been trying to get them to do various things differently!

As usual, things didn't turn out quite as I had hoped, and there were still lots of arguments, compromises, and coding decisions that I disagreed with. Ultimately, these disagreements lead to me resigning, although I was quite happy to stay on for another six months or so and see the project through to release.

What emerged, despite these arguments, was something that I am very proud of, and I honestly think that it's a great game.

Update:

A couple of years later, after doing a bit of freelance work and spending a year or so at Sony, I rejoined Sports Interactive. I was in a slightly different role, but still basically working on the underlying technology for Football Manager.

Since then my role has changed about three times, and needless to say we are still arguing! Something about omelettes and eggs springs to mind :)