Elegant Chaos

I first came across this game in 1999, when I did the Mac port of Championship Manager 99/00 for Feral.

The game took about 3 months to port, but due to various production delays (mostly me waiting for Sports Interactive to stop changing their code) I ended up staying in their office for nearer six months. During this time I got to know the SI team well, became friends with them, and had lots of interesting discussions over café breakfasts and pub lunches about the new version of their game - CM4 - which was in it's early stages and going to be a complete rewrite!

Two years later, they had some spare office space, I needed somewhere to park my computer, and so I moved back in to SI towers as a tenant whilst I started work on the Mac port of Black And White, again for Feral. Meantime, SI were still busily working CM4, although of course they hadn't done anything the way I thought that they ought to when we'd talked about it in '99.

Fast forward another six months, and Oliver Collyer announced that he was leaving the company to go wandering round the world. SI asked if I would be interested in joining the company to do the stuff he had been doing, I said yes please, and became an SI employee.

After an awful lot of hard work (and a lot of argument), CM4 emerged, with a new configurable interface, which was implemented in the main by my new code. Unfortunately, there was still a lot of old code left in there, and a combination of time constraints and various disagreements within the company meant that the UI (and the game in general) was less than perfect.

Over the next few years, and versions, I managed to move the interface, and the underlying toolkit that I had written, nearer to what I wanted it to be. Many of the other game bugs were fixed, resulting in a much improved game.

However, disagreements remained internally, due in part to a clash of programming styles between me and some of the senior programmers at SI, and in part to the innate conservatism of the SI team (and many of the fans for that matter).

Suffice to say that I wanted to change the way a lot of things were done, but I didn't get my way very often!

Luckily, along came the split between SI and Eidos. SI cleverly walked away with all the code and all the data, but Eidos did take away the name and the "look and feel" whatever that was.

All of a sudden I had lawyers on my side, positively urging the SI folks to change things that had previously been sacred, and so Football Manager was born...