Interview with Daniel Blackburn - Producer of Football World Manager. 1. Not heard of Caffeine before. How long has the company been going? The company was set up in October 1996 and has been working on Football World Manager ever since. 2. What have Caffeine done before? This is Caffeine's first title. However, the Directors have been involved in the computer games business for very many years. Dave Martin used to have his own publishing label, Martech, which was very successful on the early 8 bit and 16 bit computers during the 80's. He then spent some time at Gremlin as their Marketing Director so has been involved with Premier Manager, plus many other hit titles. Roger Womack has worked on strategy games for years, including his own successful football 'Play-by-Mail' game plus 'Football Director', 'Player Manager', 'HeroQuest' and 'Space Crusade' to name a few. I joined the company straight from University although I have always been involved in computer games and I'm a very keen gamer and a devoted football fan. We also have a great team of programmers, artists and researchers with a good blend of youth and experience. There is also a real love of football running through the team which is imperative when creating a game like World Manager. 3. A keen gamer. What are your favourites at the moment? After football management games the game that I play most has got to be quake, network death-matches are excellent. 4. A football fan. Huddersfield I suppose? No, we do have three Huddersfield fans here but I'm a Hull City fan. We have a good spread of football fans in the office, including L**ds, Sheffield United, Rotherham and Chesterfield fans. This obviously leads to some good banter around the office. Everyone can't wait for the season to start, I'm particularly looking forward to Hulls first match at Rotherham, especially after last seasons nine goal thriller. 5. How many staff has the company got? We've got 12 staff on the books at the moment, but are just now looking to recruit two new programmers and a concept artist. We reckon we'll have about 20 staff by the year 2000. 6. Where are you based? We are based in the Kirklees Media Centre in Huddersfield, a brilliant location for a games company. We are moving into 2500 square feet of new offices next month that are now being modernised courtesy of a 1.2 million pound lottery grant to the centre and these will be sufficient for our longer term plans. Also, as a tenant of the centre we have permanent online access via a leased line, a real bonus for our team of database researchers. 7. In as few words as you can, what are the key things that are going to make this game successful? Realism, Data and innovative new features. 8. There are a lot of fans of games such as 'Championship Manager' and 'Premier Manager'. What would you say to them to convince them to buy this game? I would tell them how In World Manager you can manage any team from over 50 countries, about our unique Match Action feature, about World Managers easy to use interface and …… 9. The interactive Match Action sounds novel. What was the thinking behind this? We felt that the level of interaction and detail in current management games was poor and that much more could be achieved. We designed the match action feature to give the user the a greater level of information someone watching a football match on TV would get and to display this information in a way that would be instantly understood by football fans. We also wanted to give the user the same level of control that a real manager would have. This means that as well as being able to make substitutions and changes to your tactics you will also be able to change your teams style of play. Like your teams level of aggression and how attacking or defensive you want your team to play. 10. The accuracy and depth of detail of the data is very important to football game fans. What are you doing to ensure this is comprehensive and up to date? We have several full time football researchers whose job it is to ensure that our database is as up to date and accurate as possible. The internet has been an invaluable tool, not just in collecting data on teams and competition structures from around the world but also as a way of making contacts to. 11. Football World Manager looks like a big game. How many countries, clubs and players are there in the game? World Manager is a massive game with over 20,000 players playing for approximately 1,000 club in division from over 50 countries. All these countries are being simulated each week, this means that you will be able to do anything from manage a club or scour the transfer markets in these countries. 12. Sounds like the game could have real international appeal. Was that one of the intentions? Yes, although we are a predominantly English team we wanted to create a game that reflected the international elements of football. We feel this is especially important where player transfers are concerned, a fact reflect by the number of overseas players playing for English Clubs. 13. With all that information in the game isn't finding it going to be a real bind? Not at all, in fact the interface is incredibly easy and intuitive to use, the main form of navigation is the toolbar, allowing you to get to virtually any screen in just two mouse clicks. We also use a tree control to select data by country, if for example you where playing an English club and looking at your squad you could quickly and easily view the squad of any other club in the game using the tree. 14. The face editor for the manager sounds different. What about players faces? We use a kind of photofit system in the game this not only allows users to create a likeness for their manager but also allows our researchers to create likenesses for players from any one of hundreds of thousands of combinations.