A long long time ago I was an addict of a game called Football Manager, written for the ZX Spectrum by the immortal Kevin Toms. The doddery graphics, the thrill of recognising a pattern of stick figures that usually resulted in a goal, the anguish of a star 5 Star player you loyally refused to sell beginning the next season as a has-been 1-star. Simple yet addictive gameplay, that most of today’s over-hyped eye candy doesn’t come near matching.
Until then most of my programming experience came from typing out the BASIC code listings in the Computer Magazines my dad bought, and then painstakingly fixing the inevitable typos to actually get them working.
Football Manager was bought (or more likely copied from a friend) rather than typed out, and I remember the feeling of power upon being able to access the source code. It was rather long, and I think I blew my thermal printer, with its metallic paper half the width of a portrait A4, printing out the source.
I immediately set out to make some vital changes, such as increasing the league size from 18 to 22, the actual size of the English Division 1 at the time (this is all from 20 years ago, so don’t hold me too hard to the figures).
The code itself was a mess. I seem to remember line 1 was a GOTO statement, and in its entirety a fine example of the sort of spaghetti code GOTO can create. My first lesson in good coding practice.
I’ve played more recent versions since then, much more polished, with thousands of extra features, goalkeeper coaches, contractual negotiations and whatnot, and found them all quite dull in comparison. You could complete a season of the original game in one sitting – the newer versions take forever to play, with features that bore me to tears, and of course it’s not so easy to win since there’s so many things to look out for.
But I’ve found a game that brings back all the memories, and is up there in the addictiveness stakes. Even better, it too allows me the joy of diving into the source code and complaining about the code quality, as it’s Open Source. Sure, it segfaults quite often, and it’s too easy as I managed to win the FA Cup in my second season (admittedly only to get fired in the next as I’d bankrupted poor old Preston), but it’s supremely addicitive.
It’s called Bygfoot Football Manager, and it’s written in C. Warning, play at own risk.
And in researching a link for this blog, I came across a reverse engineered version of the original Football Manager, complete with the graphical highlights. Ooh, I’m in heaven.