We are now celebrating our 100th season in ManagerLeague. It has been quite a ride, 400 weeks of fun, madness, anger, chaos, simulator-havoc, various designs and an ongoing process of improving the game (or die tying!).
The history of ManagerLeague can be traced back much further than you might expect, back to my days of playing some simplistic football-manager games on my Commodore 64 during the 80ies. From there, I was further inspired by later games, and the one that probably made the biggest impact, was USM2, Ultimate Soccer Manager II. Not sure which computer I played it on though, might have been my Atari ST or my first PC.
It was of course a single-player game, and relatively simplistic in nature. But it had "something" that I always wanted to bring into an online version, allthough I was not sure exactly what it was.
Then, some say I grew up, I finished school, started to work, and found myself in the game-industry. After a while, I was working with online games (yay, internet was born and became popular!), and a bit later, I was made infamous by being part of the trio that made Planetarion (which still exists after all these years!)
A little later, my old desire to make an online football manager asserted itself, with a vengance, and the earliest design started to take place. This is about 10-11 years back, and I apologize for not having a more specific date, so let's jsut say it was 2002.
However, as development of the game started to progress, I had some help with designing, and the beta launched looking like this:
The observant reader will notice that back then, the only browser that was worth anything was Internet Explorer 6 (-: Oh how the times have changed in that regard (-:
Now, at this stage, we planned to make a Game-portal, a gaming-community, where ManagerLeague would just be one of many games to come. So the frontpage of our site, what we know as "the portal", where you can find blogs, support etc, had a VERY different design. The gaming-portal was known as "GooseGames", and was supposed to be a very non-serious community for anyone who liked games. Here is what THAT looked like :
And while you are still laughing, because it IS rather funny looking back at this, that was the intention, to make people smile :)
So, anyway, the game developed quite a bit during the beta, and we started looking forward to the public launch of the game.
Somewhere around this point, there was a lot going on in the background with the company, and I hooked up with Chairman who was able to provide the funding we needed. Here is a copy of his very first announcement on our portal from back in the days:
Dear friends of Manager League
I am as new Chairman of the Board in Fifth Season writing this letter to all of you to tell you about our future plans for ML and its owner Fifth Season. As many of you know, the game has been out in Alpha and Beta version for about a year. It has developed a lot, and it will continue to be developed in the future.
Last month, most of the shares in the company were sold to one of the shareholders. He has got a great belief in the game, in the community and in the developer of the game, Spinner. The company has had severe financial problems over the past three years, but still it has spent a lot of money and Spinner has invested a lot of his time in the life of ML. The shareholder who bought most of Fifth Season has now invested another 100 000 USD for the game to be released in a full version. This investment has also secured the full time employment of Spinner working only with development and maintenance of ML.
The goal for ML is more than 100 000 users all over the world. One of our competitors has got more than 250 000 active accounts. I am confident in us reaching our goal. We do not want to be the biggest Football Manager Game on the web, but the best. We will start marketing the game during the summer and are planning to release the full version of the game in August / September.
In addition to the marketing activities we need your help to find new players. Go out and tell your friends, colleagues, parents, teachers and work mates about this fine game. As chairman of the board, I am authorised to make incentives to our internet community. We will give away free credits to all active accounts when we reach our first goal. Fifth Season and Manager Leagues first goal is to reach 5000 active players. When we manage that, all accounts will receive 5 free credits. In other words, we will give you credits worth 12 500 Euros upon succeeding this goal. Please help us in doing so. As long as we have faith in the community, game and the people employed by Fifth Season, Manager League will survive. We hope that all of you will join us in the future, and contribute by helping us to get many more fellow managers in to our game.
LET THE GAME AND THE FUN BEGIN
I have also been able to dig up my last official post on the portal right before the launch, and here it is :
And so, the time has come. In just a few hours ManagerLeague begins its first official season.
It has been a long night, with a certain amount of last-minute issues to resolve. As a seasoned game-developer, this came as no surprise to me.
I hope we are all in for a great first season in ManagerLeague, and that the start-up problems will be as small as possible. My experience tells me there will be some though.
Good luck to all the teams, all the managers, all the players and the poor referees.
And to me!
Written by Spinner 05:47 15/09 2005
And on September 15th, i 2005, at 08:00 in the morning, we launched.........
