Addictive Games
One game, a post-office box, and a pun that meant it
Kevin Toms' publisher, advertising Football Manager from a Milton Keynes address in February 1982 and from Bournemouth by 1984. The name was a promise about the product, and the product delivered on it.
Addictive Games existed to sell Kevin Toms’ Football Manager, and it named itself after the effect it was claiming. The earliest advertisement held here runs in Your Computer for February 1982, from 267B Conniburrow Boulevard, Milton Keynes — a street address, not a trading estate — and ends: “BUT BEWARE, this game is extremely addictive!”
Fast facts
- Addresses: 267B Conniburrow Boulevard, Milton Keynes (1982); PO Box 278, Conniburrow, Milton Keynes MK14 7NE (1982); 7a Richmond Hill, Bournemouth, Dorset BH2 6HE (by 1984).
- The game: Football Manager, ZX81 and TRS-80 in 1982, Spectrum that September, C64 and BBC by 1984.
- Sequel: Football Manager 2, 1988.
- Running it from 1984: John Croft, previously the company’s finance director.
- Advertising in the British press: continuously from 1982 to the end of the decade.
From mail order to the shops
The 1982 advertisements ask for a cheque or postal order and warn you to allow 28 days for delivery. There is no distributor, no packaging shot, and no company logo — just the game’s feature list, a price, and an address to post money to.
By 1984 the advertisements carry a Golden Joystick nomination, prices for four machines, and the line “available from computer software stockists nationwide, including selected branches of” a named high-street chain. The address by then is Bournemouth. In two years the operation had moved from a house number to a shopfront trade, on the strength of a single title.
Toms steps back
CRASH reported in November 1984 that Toms was handing day-to-day responsibility for Addictive to the company’s finance director, John Croft, “so that he could concentrate more on the creative side” — and that a new company, Silicon Joy, had appeared with three games nearly ready: Grand Prix Manager, a boxing game, and Trio. At the PCW Show that year Toms was on the Addictive stand, promoting the new venture.
The pattern is a familiar one for the British software business of the mid-eighties. A programmer whose one game sells in the hundreds of thousands becomes, without meaning to, the managing director of a company — and the way back to writing programs runs through hiring somebody to do the other job.
What became of it
⚠ Addictive’s ending is not established from the sources held here. The label was still in use in 1988 for games Toms had nothing to do with — ACE reviewed Hotshot that September as “released under the Addictive label” — which places it as an imprint of a larger publisher by then rather than the operation that advertised from Conniburrow Boulevard. Which publisher, and on what date, the period press held here does not say cleanly, and the company is not on the current Companies House register: the register’s coverage stops well short of the eighties, so its absence is expected and means nothing either way.