THE MAKING OF LMA Manager
The majority of football management games have traditionally thrived on PC. But Codemasters’ LMA Manager was successful in targeting the Playstation alone. We talk to its producer about the game’s unique features and series-defining legacy
There have been countless attempts to replicate Football Manager’s success on consoles over the years, but even Football Manager hasn’t always got it right. Arguably the most notable series to leave a lasting impression was Codemasters’ LMA Manager.
It began in 1999. Back then, Sports Interactive’s Championship Manager was well-established and was dominating the football management scene, but competitors weren’t in short supply. EA Sports was proving persistent with its new FA Premier
League Football Manager franchise, while the likes of Premier Manager continued to retain a loyal fanbase. The subgenre seemed to be going through somewhat of a boom period, and publishers soon latched on to the hype.
But few of these games were focusing their efforts solely on console. They were, understandably, targeting the traditionally popular PC market, often producing ports for various systems along the way.
LMA Manager was to take a different approach, being “the only football management game designed specifically for the Playstation”. “Codemasters had been working on an idea for a [football management]
game for quite a while,” says
Simon Prytherch, the producer on
LMA Manager. “And they showed me what they had – they had the initial research and prototypes for a management game, and I said I think we should go all-in and design it from the ground up.”
His decision was based on the desire for a console-only direction. “[Codemasters] were in the process of expanding really rapidly because a lot of the other games were bringing in money. And we were making all that money on consoles,” remembers Simon. “We had gone all-in on the Playstation with Micro Machines, TOCA Race
Driver and Colin Mcrae Rally, and Colin Mcrae Rally and TOCA were being developed in parallel with LMA Manager.”
According to Simon, the initial prototypes had been largely Pc-driven, adopting a “Football
Manager-esque” design. But the decision to switch development to the Playstation saw LMA Manager prioritise a more console-accessible focus, with the goal of allowing players to access everything within two or three button clicks. “That was quite a challenge when you’ve got so much information in a football game,” he reveals. The Making Of:
The developer achieved this by developing the series’ now-famed tab system, utilising all four of the Playstation controller’s shoulder buttons to transition between different menus. This, combined with the face buttons, ensured navigation remained a breeze, even when engaging in complex transfer negotiations. And crucially, it never left you pining for the comfort of a keyboard and mouse.
“The first thing we did was put together a prototype of the user interface,” explains Simon. “So that we could illustrate how quick LMA Manager
Wherever possible, everything should be visible at a glance Simon Prytherch
it would be to get to any part of the screen – we did a couple of key screens like tactics and team selection, and when people saw that and had a feel of that, they felt it would make playing a management game really easy on a console.”
There were other considerations to take into account as well. The intent wasn’t to overload LMA
Manager with a stat-heavy interface, given its quick and accessible nature. Then again, it also required enough depth to compete with similar management titles on the market. Simon and his team decided upon a unique approach to differentiate
LMA from its peers.
“What we wanted to do was set ourselves apart in every screenshot from other management games, so we didn’t want to have lots of numbers on the screen,” Simon explains. “So wherever possible, everything should be visible at a glance on a pretty low-res TV screen. Which meant the bars that represented 0-100 had graduations in them, and if you wanted to know what position a football player could play, it would shade a part of the football pitch next to them. So you would see at a glance how good a player was by the length of the bars and the positions they would play.”
LMA Manager still retained the core features of many typical management games. It allowed players to take control of any English league team and compete in one of ten scenario-based challenges, or opt for the more exhaustive choice of embarking on a 50-year career. You could manipulate lineups, tactics, and the transfer market to your advantage, as well as managing aspects such as training and finances to help curate long-term success.
Its biggest hook, however, served as the inclusion of an extensive 3D highlights engine.
While the games themselves would play out amidst an engaging top-down view, it was the Tv-style post-game recap that really captured players’ imaginations. The idea was to develop an immersive feature with alluring graphical prowess.
“We realised on the low-powered Playstation, we wouldn’t be able to do [in-game highlights] because we wanted to make it look really polished,” says Simon. “So what we developed was a system to generate highlights based on loads and loads of presets which were polished, and then being able to flip it into the four quadrants of the pitch.”
The new system allowed for highlights to be replicated in various ways depending on the scenario. “We’d only have to develop a move for a quarter of the pitch, and that way we could then multiply that move by four by mirroring it and flipping it into the other quadrant,” he explains. “We developed a whole load of tools basically to set up those highlights, and then during the game, the action would be mapped to the closest fitting highlight.”
These highlights, combined with short full-motion video punditry segments, led to the post-game show emitting a convincing Match
Of The Day feel. The addition of
Alan Hansen and Ray Stubbs as commentators only enhanced this further, with the use of their voices contributing a sense of authenticity to the broadcast-like presentation.
The highlight system and the rest of the game’s in-depth features were a struggle to implement in time for release, however. LMA had proved a more exhaustive project than originally planned, and it became apparent that more development time would be required.
“I think it took 18 months in development – maybe a bit longer,” says Simon. “The plan was that we were going to go for the previous season’s launch, but once we started development, we realised this was going to be a bigger game. And so we went back to the directors at Codemasters and I secured another year’s worth of development.”
Much of the development team had to be sourced from scratch, too.
In its prototype stages, the game had started out with just three people on board. But as the project began to take hold, Simon focused his efforts on acquiring fresh new talent.
“Because Codemasters were expanding really rapidly, what
I did was concentrate on hiring enthusiastic – technically able, but really enthusiastic graduates,” he says. “All of the ones that we recruited for that project have gone on to do bigger and better things. “Like the main guy doing the football engine, for instance, Gary Paterson
(LMA 2001-2003) – he went on to head up FIFA on the technical side.”
The extra development time also led to the team seeking the approval of the League Managers Association. The LMA had served – and still does
– as a “collective, representative voice” of English Premier League and Football League teams, making the organisation a suitable fit. “They were interested in raising their profile and nobody else had approached them,” says Simon. “And so we found it quite easy to talk to them. They shared quite a lot with us.”
With that collaboration came a significant degree of responsibility. The team was committed to delivering a statistically accurate game, but with four tiers of playable leagues (and European teams included as well), the task was sizeable. Unlike other established management sims, Codemasters didn’t have a pre-existing database to build upon.
“What we did was we recruited locally within the Leamington area – football fans, basically – that were really good at computer skills. And we set up a really easy data entry system using Microsoft Access, but building a front-end into that,” Simon explains. “And those football fans, I tasked them by saying, look – I want you to contact every football club’s fan club, because they know their side inside out, and basically build a network through email and other contacts.”
This only added to the timeconsuming work required by the team. It proved a stretch to meet the deadline, even despite the extended schedule. “We worked extremely hard and I think, during that year, there were some long hours,” Simon admits. “So yeah, we were working extremely hard and looking to have a very polished game that would have a massive impact when it was launched.”
When it finally released in late 1999, LMA Manager was met with critical acclaim. Fans and reviewers alike praised its control scheme and authentic gameplay elements, as well as its immersive 3D highlights feature. The hard work had paid off.
“We had a lot of press going into it and people had high expectations,” says Simon, noting that the team would regularly receive letters from passionate fans. “We were elated [when it succeeded] because we were all convinced that this was going to be big, and we’d internally convinced directors and marketing, so I think we’d have had a lot of egg on our faces if it had flopped.”
Its success led to significant growth. LMA Manager was followed up two years later with a sequel, in which the match engine was significantly enhanced and the menus were freshened up. It then made a successful transition to the PS2 and original Xbox, implementing a visually impressive 3D engine that negated the need for pregenerated highlights. The franchise eventually drew to a close shortly following
LMA 2007 ’s debut on the Xbox 360. By then, times had changed. Simon had left the company in
2003 – he suggests the series perhaps suffered from a lack of
“real groundbreaking features” in its final years. But as for his own
experiences, he recalls the franchise – particularly the first game – as a notable career high.
“I’ve worked with many great teams, and even now I have fond memories of the first LMA Manager.
You don’t get many moments in your career like that, where everyone gels and is pulling in the same direction,” he says. “I still look back at it now and think, ‘That’s one of the top three peaks in my career, if not the top.’”
It’s now been well over a decade since LMA Manager’s cancellation, and exactly 20 years since its debut on Playstation. And yet, people are still talking about it. The series undoubtedly left a significant imprint on both the games industry and many football fans’ hearts, with its original iteration laying the foundations for one of the most enjoyable sports management franchises of all time.
i still look back at it now and think, ‘that’s one of the top three peaks in my career, if not the top’ Simon Prytherch