Addictive Games

Albert House, Albert Road, Bournemouth

The two things I associate with Addictive Games are Football Manager and Kevin Toms' face. His decision to do a Victor Remmington and put himself on adverts and packaging was smart. It gave Addictive Games a personality and made the company stand out at a time when most software houses were anonymous and programmers were just names or, at best, occasional photographs in a magazine. It helps of course that the game is Football Manager. One of those rare titles which achieved escape velocity and became a cultural touchstone in its own right. I was amazed when idly searching the online British Newspaper Archive to find a 1994 review of Premier Manager 3, for the Amiga, where Football Manager still had enough resonance for the writer open the review with: "Football Management games have been around since the early days of computing, with Kevin Toms' Football Manager setting the standards on the good old Sinclair Spectrum." (NEWCASTLE JOURNAL, Friday 18 November 1994 page 33).
267B Conniburrow Boulevard. Milton Keynes

In the beginning Football Manager was advertised without Kevin Toms immediate endorsement although there is an anonymous strapline "if you like football you'll love this game." One of Football Manager's great strengths was its promiscuity, the game was converted to just about any format you can remember, and even in these early days copies were on sale for the ZX81 and ZX80, and  TRS-80/Video Genie system.

Kevin Toms was interviewed in RETRO GAMER issue 63 and he offers a memory from the time when Addictive Games was run from his flat in Milton Keynes and duplication was done manually: "I had to do them one by one. I'd set the recording going, watch the telly and when I heard the buzzing stop I'd get up and put another one on." He'd sold 300 copies of the ZX-81 version after four months on sale, and only three for the Video Genie/TRS-80. The TRS-80 version slid into obscurity, and you can read about the recovery of what might be the last surviving copy here. 

"The appearance of the Spectrum hit our sales considerably," Kevin told POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (10-16 May 1984 page 13), something which also caused severe problems for Silversoft, "but once we'd made a version for the new machine, things looked up again." The ZX Spectrum version was turned around quickly. The computer made its debut in April 1982 and the new version of Football Manager is being advertised by September 1982 alongside the ZX81 and TRS-80 versions. There's a splurge of advertising to promote the launch of the new version before things settle down. 1983 sees Addictive Games start to advertise monthly in SINCLAIR USER, unsurprisingly considering the formats on which Football Manager is available, and you can track the company across the year; in February the TRS-80 and ZX80 versions are dropped from adverts and the price is cut from £7.95 to £5.95 for the ZX81, and £6.95 for the Spectrum version; in April the game is picked up by WH Smiths and Boots, and the Addictive Games advert is changed to read: "Now in your high street shops;" the same month someone takes the time to design a logo for Addictive Games, an A and G mashed together to form two sides of a pyramid, previously the company just wrote the name in a fancy font; and then everything changes just in time for Christmas.

 December 1983 marks the start of a big new advertising push. The cheap quarter-page black and white adverts are gone and Addictive Games enters the bright world of full page colour; in CRASH that would have cost £450, and CRASH was at the cheaper end of the market. New box art is created, and the AG pyramid logo is dropped for one which would last for the remainder of the company's life; a lightning bolt piercing the A of Addictive, and jolting it into an electric shocked state. There well chosen screenshots showing highlights of the game, comments from reviews and customers, a corner banner promoting BBC and Oric versions "coming soon, and, gazing down on it all, the beneficent face of Kevin Toms. There's also a new address for the company.

Albert House, Albert Road, Bournemouth, BH1

May 2022

The full page colour advert appeared in five different magazines in December 1983; COMPUTER AND VIDEOGAMES, COMPUTER CHOICE, SINCLAIR USER, YOUR COMPUTER, and ZX COMPUTING. Behind the scenes Addictive Games might still be a one person operation but the public face is now indistinguishable from its contemporaries, with one key difference. This success is based on one game selling on two formats, the ZX Spectrum and ZX81. When Kevin Toms spoke to PERSONAL COMPUTER WEEKLY in 1984 he gave some insight into the company's history: "When we started out, the company staff consisted of myself and my wife. We were so busy just with Football Manager that we had no time to work on other games. Since. we moved to Bournemouth -I come from Torbay myself and I wanted to be by the sea again- I've taken on three full-time programmers, and three people to work on the sales and administration side. So now I can concentrate on designing new games."

Those games would come, in time but first there were more conversions of Football Manager.

7a Richmond Hill, Bournemouth

May 2022

Finding Albert House didn't present any problems -in the picture above the name is written over the door on the left but it doesn't show up well. Finding 7A Richmond Hill was surprisingly more complicated. A process of elimination led me to the big Art Deco building on the corner of Post Office Road and Richmond Hill, where the restaurant Wildwood occupies street numbers 6-7, but where is the entrance to 7A? I don't know. It may have been lost in a renovation or I may have been looking at the wrong building. I hope not. Photographing the building was also complicated. I couldn't fit it all in. I

This... is not good

decided to try the ultra-wide angle mode on my camera after a disastrous attempt to use the panorama feature. If the perspective looks a little skewiff on the proper picture, it's because I've tried to correct it in Photoshop.

In 1984 Addictive Games created a short-lived spin-off label called Silicon Joy to sell games submitted by hopeful authors; four games were released, Grand Prix Manager, Boxing, Run-Your-Own-League, and compilation of three other titles called Trio. 

The BBC Model B version of Football Manager was advertised in June 1984, the Commodore 64 version followed in October, and by January 1985 the game was also listed as available on the Amstrad, Acorn Electron, Oric 48k and Oric Atmos (although in RETRO GAMER Kevin Toms says: "the Oric Atmos and Oric-1 were such unpredictable machines we could never get a reliable load so abandoned them"), Dragon, VIC-20, plus an MSX version coming soon. 1985 also saw Software Star a new game from Kevin Toms, advertised alongside Football Manager which was still selling after three years. 

10 Albert Road, Bournemouth, BH1

Addictive Games began running a new address on their adverts in 1986, which turns out to be their old address. 10 Albert Road is also the door to Albert House. I don't understand why Addictive Games returned to their old address. They may have always kept an office at Albert House and simply moved their administration back (as Elite did, they always kept one foot at their Anchor House address), or maybe they downsized. They were still releasing games for a spread of computers but the flood of Football Manager conversions was beginning to slow; just versions for the Atari 8 bit and Commodore 16/Plus 4 in 1986. Kevin Toms was working on a new game called President, you may find the President pictured in the advert looks familiar, but the strain of trying to design new games and run a company was beginning to tell. April 1987 saw the announcement that Prism Leisure Corporation would take over Addictive Games' products, POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (3-9 April 1987 page 4). The wording of the news story is very precise, Prism is taking over the name of Addictive Games and their products but not the company, and the story notes Toms will now be operating as KJT Design Ltd. This clears up an odd mystery on the Companies House website where the record for Addictive Games (company number 02137058) begins on 3rd June 1987, set up by Prism Leisure. It was unlikely that Addictive Games wasn't trading as a registered company for all those years so Addictive Games must have been a label of KJT Design Ltd (company number 01734562) which was incorporated on 27th June 1983 and dissolved on 9th Feb 1993. 

Kevin Toms was contracted to produce four games in the next two years; three of them were Football Manager 2 (1988), Football Manager 2 Expansion Kit (1989)  Football Manager: World Cup Edition (1990). I'm not sure if the fourth was produced, it could be the MSX version of Football Manager although this was published by a company called Endurance Games. 

For those of you keeping count, this is the final score for conversions of Football Manager; TRS-80, ZX80, ZX81, ZX Spectrum, BBC Model B,  Amstrad, Commodore 64, Commodore 16/Plus 4, Acorn Electron, Dragon 32, VIC-20, MSX, Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Windows 10, MacOS and iOS. I think that's all of them. I make that 21 different versions. Football Manager's strength was its simplicity and like Chris Sievy's The Biz, from Virgin Games, it's still possible to waste hours playing it now on a mobile phone. I should know. It's kept me occupied for hours on trains.

Football Manager is still available to play now and you can find links to buy and download the game at Kevin Toms' website. Leave a comment or follow me on Twitter @ShamMountebank. If you are Kevin Toms please let me know if you are taller than Big Simon from Design Design/Crystal.