In 1982 a London firm, Cases Computer Simulations, was advertising cassettes for the ZX81 and Spectrum under the heading “MANAGEMENT GAMES”. In Airline the player decided how many aircraft to run, whether to buy or charter, and how much to spend on staff and maintenance, and then faced “tax demands, strikes, cancelled flights, hijacks and aircraft crashes”. In Autochef, as managing director of a catering company, you negotiated leases and set menu prices and wages, and “you will be made to resign if you are not successful”. There was nothing to steer and nothing to shoot. The player ran an organisation through numbers and decisions, advanced the clock and read what happened. That is still what the genre is.
Fast facts
- The idea: the player runs an institution, such as a city, a business, a club or a park, instead of controlling a character.
- Early examples: The Sumerian Game (IBM, 1964) and Hamurabi, which spread through David Ahl’s books of BASIC games.
- British 8-bit: Cases Computer Simulations’ management games and Football Manager, both 1982.
- Football: Football Manager (1982), Football Director, Tracksuit Manager, Player Manager, Championship Manager (1992) and, from 2004, Sports Interactive’s Football Manager.
- Cities and parks: SimCity (1989), Theme Park (1994), Transport Tycoon (1994), RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999).
How it plays
The player acts indirectly. You set a price, pick a team or build a road, and the program’s model decides what follows: whether customers come, whether the team wins, whether the traffic flows. Money is the constraint that returns every turn, and failure usually builds up from small decisions instead of arriving all at once. Many management games have no winning condition and end only when the player is sacked, goes bankrupt or stops.
Because the game lives in its figures, it needed little from the hardware’s graphics. Football Manager’s first advertisement listed four divisions, the FA Cup, a transfer market, injuries and a save-game option, “all this and much much more packed tightly into 16K RAM”. On the ZX81 there were no match highlights at all: you picked the side and read the result.
Hamurabi
The oldest management games were written to teach. The Sumerian Game, first played by schoolchildren in 1964, asked them to run the economy of an ancient city; a 1967 report on the project described pupils at typewriter terminals who “pretended to be priest-rulers in ancient Sumer”. A shorter game on the same theme, written in FOCAL at Digital Equipment Corporation and converted to BASIC by David Ahl, became Hamurabi, and Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games carried it to home computers. Its whole interface was a yearly report followed by questions: how much land to buy or sell, how much grain to feed the people, and how many acres to plant. “You will quickly find that a certain number of people can only tend a certain amount of land and that people starve if they are not fed enough,” the book warned. The simulation games entry tells this part of the story in more detail.
Football management
Football Manager, written by Kevin Toms and first advertised by Addictive Games in February 1982, is widely credited with starting the football management game. It was in BASIC, it sold by mail order before it reached the shops, and by Addictive’s count it had sold half a million copies by 1988. What held players, Toms told CRASH in 1985, was “the burst of activity involved in picking a side and arranging transfers, followed by the suspense of awaiting the results”.
Other publishers followed. Retro Gamer‘s history of football games in 2004 recalled D&H Games building “a legion of fans” with Football Director and Football Fever, and Goliath Games’ Tracksuit Manager, an 8-bit international management game that “initially couldn’t be bought in shops” and pioneered the text commentary later used by Championship Manager. On the Amiga and ST came US Gold’s The Manager, Gremlin’s Premier Manager series and Player Manager.
Championship Manager was the work of the Collyer brothers, who, in Retro Gamer‘s words, were “fed up with the lacklustre football management games on the market”. Domark published it in 1992. The press did not think much of it. Previewing it in April 1992, Amiga Format complained that it was “all text-based with no animation, giving it that quaint, 1980s Spectrum-feel”. Its review that August called it “a purely management game (no arcade sections)” that happened “via a series of tables and text screens, which quickly gets boring”, and scored it 41%. It went into the magazine’s sales chart at number 15 all the same. Championship Manager 93 made it faster to play, and the series settled into yearly updates, developed by the brothers’ company, Sports Interactive, and published by Eidos. When Sports Interactive split from the publisher Eidos, which kept the Championship Manager name, they bought the rights to the name Football Manager for their next game, Football Manager 2005, published by Sega. That series is Sports Interactive’s, and it is not descended from Toms’s program.
Business and parks
The business simulation was a hard sell at first. Peter Molyneux wrote one in 1983 and sold it by mail order. “Back in 1983, all a programmer had to do was write a simple shoot ’em up and they’d be a millionaire,” he told Edge in 1994. “But with my business acumen I decided to write a business simulator.” It got two orders. Eleven years later Bullfrog’s Theme Park gave the player an amusement park to run, with rides to build, prices to set, and visitors who were sick after the fast rides, and by 1998 magazines were putting its sales at over three and a half million.
Chris Sawyer wrote two of the best-known PC management games. Transport Tycoon (MicroProse, 1994) built a transport company from road, rail, air and sea routes. RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999) let players lay their own coasters piece by piece and watch individual guests enjoy them or be sick, and it was the best-selling PC game of 1999 in America. The tycoon games entry follows that line.
SimCity
SimCity (Maxis, 1989) made the player the mayor of a city with no enemy and no way to win. The player zoned land and set taxes, and a model running underneath decided where people moved and where crime, traffic and pollution grew. Looking back in December 1990, The One called it “Maxis’ first ‘software toy’” and “one of the two most original pieces of entertainment software released that year”. It had sold a million copies by early 1992.
Sources
- Sinclair User issue 8, November 1982: Cases Computer Simulations advertisement, “Management Games” (Airline, Autochef, Print Shop). ZX Computing, August 1982: an earlier Cases advertisement under the same heading.
- Richard L. Wing and others, “The Production and Evaluation of Three Computer-based Economics Games for the Sixth Grade: Final Report”, June 1967, ERIC ED014227 (web): the Sumerian game. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED014227
- “The Sumerian Game”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Mabel Addis, William McKay, 1964. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sumerian_Game
- David H. Ahl, BASIC Computer Games, microcomputer edition (Creative Computing, 1978): Hamurabi, its origin in FOCAL at DEC and its description.
- Your Computer, February 1982, p. 53: Addictive Games’ first advertisement for Football Manager (“packed tightly into 16K RAM”).
- CRASH issue 17, June 1985, p. 77: news item on Football Manager’s third year (Toms on why it succeeded).
- Sinclair User issue 99, May 1990, p. 25: Addictive Games advertisement (“six years (and half a million copies sold)”).
- Your Sinclair issue 54, June 1990: “Written in 100% Basic”.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 55, April 1998, p. 14: correction naming Sports Interactive as developer of Championship Manager 97/98, published by Eidos.
- Retro Gamer issue 4, 2004, pp. 53–56: history of football games (Football Director, Tracksuit Manager, the Collyer brothers, Championship Manager and Championship Manager 93, the Amiga and ST management games, the split from Eidos and the Football Manager name).
- Amiga Format issue 33, April 1992: Championship Manager preview. Issue 37, August 1992: review (£24.99) and sales chart (entry at number 15). Issue 38, September 1992: chart with review score, 41%.
- Edge issue 9, June 1994, pp. 34–35: Theme Park preview (Molyneux’s 1983 business simulator).
- Edge issue 63, October 1998, p. 78, and PC Gamer (UK) issue 63, December 1998, p. 156: Theme Park’s sales.
- Computer Gaming World issue 189, April 2000, p. 34: top-selling PC games of 1999 (RollerCoaster Tycoon first).
- The One issue 27, December 1990: SimCity as Maxis’s first “software toy”.
- Info issue 46, January 1992, p. 18: SimCity’s one millionth copy.