The Making Of: Footballer Of The Year
From its peculiar origin to a brand-new videogame subgenre, we delve into the history behind this trailblazing simulator that combines both action and strategy to create a unique footballing videogame experience. Game on!
Chris Shrigley on his innovative footy game
y the mid-eighties, 8-bit football videogames were still dominated by a triad of three titles: Match Day on the ZX Spectrum, International Soccer on the Commodore 64, and management smash hit Football Manager on practically every format going. Many challenged, but few competed, before 1986 saw a glut of football games appearing as publishers sought to take advantage of the World Cup, set in Mexico.
“The football strategy game to answer every boyhood dream,” is the claim on the back of Footballer Of The Year’s inlay, and its unique selling point is the way that the player takes control of a singular character, the footballing world at your feet as a 17-year-old fourthdivision striker. “The first I heard about the game was when Kevin Norburn handed me a folder full of paper, and a package with bits of card and stuff in it,” begins Chris Shrigley, one of Gremlin’s cadre of in-house coders. Along with his friends, Andy Green and
Robert Toone, Chris had impressed Gremlin with the bouncing ball game, Bounder. “Then we did Future Knight, which was our Ghosts ’N Goblins knock-off, and although original, it lacked inspiration and was a bit rubbish,” he notes modestly. Both of those games were a team effort in terms of coding, but for his next project, Chris was flying solo. “I was assigned Footballer Of The Year, and up until that point I had always worked with Andy [Green]. We were a bit of a double act, and because we always did one game at a time, it worked out that way. But as there were multiple projects to be done now we were at Gremlin, it was inevitable that we’d be split up.”
“I was excited to be working on something on my own that was apparently quite important” Chris Shrigley
The package that Chris was handed by his colleague was an unusual one for a software house such as Gremlin Graphics to receive. “We were used to getting demos and full games sent in to look at,” says Chris, “and I still remember Jack The Nipper showing up one day, and us all falling in love with it. So yeah, it was odd, but it was really an elaborate game design document, which gave us a good base to build on.” Gremlin Graphics’ boss Ian Stewart picks up the story. “Two brothers from Reading had contacted us, and we invited them to Sheffield to see what they had,” he tells us. “They basically wanted a computer game made based on the board game that they had created.” With the brothers also attempting to sell the original paper version (more on that later), an interim videogame interpretation was given the go-ahead, with Gremlin eyeing up that World Cup as a useful marketing tool.
In Footballer Of The Year, the player begins as a fresh-faced teenaged trainee, ready for action at a fourth-division club of your choosing. Although the option to begin in other leagues is presented at the start, beginning at a higher level so young makes the game extremely difficult, with the necessary equipment prohibitively expensive. With the overall aim of achieving the eponymous accolade, each match is an important step in the career of this upand-coming star. To help you, there are a series of cards that can be purchased before each match. Incident cards generate a specific event which can either be beneficial or detrimental, and operate randomly; transfer cards summon a scout who will engineer a move to another club if suitably impressed; and the most important, goal cards, which give the player between one and three attempts on goal, with the game switching from its text management simulation to an arcade-style shooting section. “It was a bit of a dogpile, the design,” recalls Chris. “Terry Lloyd, Rob Toone, Simon Hulbert and myself were all involved, and even Ian [Stewart] and Kev [Norburn] had some input. I was busying myself prepping for the project and panicking about doing my first solo game, but the design came together quickly – the original [board] game was really detailed, so the final design for the Commodore 64 game was almost exactly the same.”
Up until Footballer Of The Year, Chris’ and
Andy [Green]’s workloads had been divided up within each project. “I never got to work on a whole game,” explains Chris, “instead working on different pieces like the scroller, interrupts, sprite routines and parts of the game logic. It was a comfortable setup, but a bit of a luxury. So I was excited to be working on something on my own that was apparently quite important, and also scared shitless, because I’d never written an entire game by myself before.” Development for Footballer Of The Year began on Chris’ favoured platform, the Commodore 64. “The design was pretty much as per the original board game, with some additions like the interactive shootout stuff. There were other considerations around graphics and memory, but that was typical.” These arcadestyle sections saw the player presented with a goal mouth, defenders, goalkeeper and the ball. Select a side to shoot, hope the goalie misses, and it’s score one for the new super striker. Occasionally a penalty shootout will occur, with
the ball on the spot and just the goalkeeper to beat. With the rest of the game randomly generated, this was the segment that felt key. “Obviously the board game didn’t have those interactive interludes,” notes Chris, “so we had an opportunity to drop something fun into the Commodore 64 version. But I don’t think anyone was completely satisfied with the results, and I’m sure it was a compromise around schedule and memory. It usually came down to that.”
hris has so far skipped around what became known in Gremlin lore as ‘the kitchen incident’. “It was not one of my finer moments,” he reveals candidly. Having become embroiled in an argument with a fellow programmer, Chris endured what he calls ‘a mini-meltdown’ in the Gremlin canteen. “I was stressed and under pressure to deliver the game on-time – remember, it was my first solo game. Fortunately, Ian handled it all really well, and didn’t sack me, showing what a good boss he was.” Chris’ semi-destruction of the Gremlin kitchen aside, he worked on the Commodore 64 game for several months. “I had to figure out a lot of stuff I’d not done before, and deal with all the nitty-gritty, unpleasant minutiae that’s part of a project that people don’t tell you about. I’d get hung up on problems, have sleepless nights then figure it out, feeling like king of the world.” As it neared completion, Chris began developing the Atari and Commodore 16 ports, with Greg Holmes, Shaun Hollingworth and Steven
Kerry busy on the ZX Spectrum game. Fellow Commodore coder Jason Perkins was called in by Ian Stewart to help Chris when things got especially testy. “Shaun in particular suffered me, and taught me some lessons about being professional, and then there was Ben Daglish,” recalls Chris warmly. Tasked with providing the game’s soundtrack, the musician [who sadly died in 2018) is fondly recalled by the coder.
“He was my cigarette-smoking rock-and-roll hero who let me hide in his music room when things got tough.”
Original in concept, Footballer Of The Year received praise upon its release – despite the game’s limited nature – as reviewers appreciated the attempt to create a management game that featured a little more action than normal. The save and load feature was an inspired inclusion, given that it actively encouraged players to continue improving their striker, up the leagues and into the international arena. “Sales were okay, but only really in the UK,
which hampered its success unfortunately,” remembers Ian. Yet the game sold well enough for the developer to commission a sequel, Footballer Of The Year 2, which appeared in 1989 as the next football World Cup loomed on the horizon. Offering a similar theory of gameplay to the original game, this follow-up switched to a fashionable overhead view in its action sequences and also presented superior tactical options to the player, greatly improving the overall experience. With Chris Shrigley busy on other projects, Scott Guest took on coding duties for the Commodore 64 game while Gary Priest (Frank Bruno’s Boxing, Basil The Great Mouse Detective) handled the ZX Spectrum version.
Sales of Footballer Of The Year 2 were poor as the 8-bit era began to fade, and the focus shifted to more complex football management games, or pure arcade extravaganzas. Yet the story does not end there: in a nod to Footballer Of The Year’s paper-and-card origins, Gremlin Graphics did indeed publish a board game version, under
“It was a significant project for me and I learned an awful lot about making all of a game” Chris Shrigley
the name of possibly the most famous striker of the Eighties, Gary Lineker. “I contacted his agent and struck a deal, even meeting Gary on a couple of occasions,” recalls
Ian. “We produced the board game – Gary Lineker’s Footballer Of The Year – with the endorsement, but it wasn’t a great success, I’m afraid!” With its 40 playing tokens, skill dice, incident cards and colourful board, the board game retained much of the spirit of Gremlin’s footballing videogames, and included a controversial squiggle from someone at its publishing partner, Birmingham Games. “The guy who headed up the company took it upon himself to forge Gary Lineker’s signature!” reveals Ian, in a contentious and careless move that saw the game thrust into the spotlight during 1988.
But back in 1986, and the original Footballer Of The Year proved to be a solid seller, especially on the Commodore 64. “It was a significant project for me and I learned an awful lot about making all of a game and effectively working with people other than my mates,”
Chris Shrigley recalls. “It was a rocky project too, and it made me lose my mind at times. But by the end of it, I felt confident that I could tackle anything.” Additionally, as a football player and Derby County fan (“Up the rams!” he chimes), Footballer Of The Year holds a special place for Chris – but after all the trials and kitchen tantrums, how does he think he did? “I think I did a decent job at the time. It was rough around the edges, and there were a lot of ‘firsts’ and sleepless nights. But I just worked doggedly through it and got the game done. Any fear of the unknown, or lack of self-confidence had completely gone by the end of the project, and that set the tone for my entire career.”
With the hugely popular mobile game
New Star Soccer as an obvious descendant, Footballer Of The Year maintains its place in the history of pixelated footballing history as the videogame that revitalised the genre and introduced the one-man as star gameplay that remains popular today. While it may not have quite reached the Premier League heights of, say, Football Manager or Match Day, this plucky underdog was more than capable of competing, the videogame equivalent of Stoke away on a rainy, damp Tuesday night.