Kevin Toms is a name I’m sure will be familiar to anyone who grew up with the 8-bits. As well as starting the ball rolling with the multi-million selling Football Manager games, he also had success publishing games through his Addictive label, such as his own “Software Star” and “President”.
Most folk that know me, know what a huge part his games have played and continue to play in my life. As such, I got pretty excited when I heard that he was going to be making an appearance at Crash Live, an annual event that I was planning on attending once more with my good buddy Peter Mulholland.
Getting to Kenilworth was a saga in itself, but after the initial issues we were settling into things nicely when we spotted our hero in a corridor, to be fair at 6 foot 5, he’s kind of difficult to miss! Trying to overcome being a bit starstruck I stumbled “Hi, Kevin Toms is it? I’m a huge fan of your work” if that opening gambit was a bit cheesy & embarrassing, what happened next more than made up for it…
“What are you up to now lads?” says the creator of the football management genre “I’m just heading to the bar if you fancy a pint?”
Whatever our plans were as we entered that corridor, they were immediately cancelled! The 3 of us headed to find a table and I tried to keep my cool.
Although I’ve written a few articles for Break Space, I’m not an experienced journalist and didn’t have a dictaphone or a pen and paper to hand, I didn’t even have the presence of mind to get my phone out to try to record our chat for posterity. No, our conversation lives only in the memory of the 3 fellows round that table, but what a memory it was for the lads from Lisburn.
We chatted about the hassles we had getting to the event thanks to Storm Claudia. We talked about the Dutch transportation system and how it’s a cycling utopia. We touched on the hassles of eating out when you have food allergies, how money is ruining football, Kevin’s adventures in Canada and New Zealand and why exactly was it “99” to continue? We also had a bit of a chat about his appearance on Richard Herring’s podcast and how weird (but thrilling) it was to watch people play your games on Twitch and how useful it was for finding bugs.
Ultimately it was a thoroughly lovely couple of pints. He was extremely patient with our questions and our fanboying and didn’t seem too weirded out by the experience, he even agreed to sign my copies of his games. They say never meet your heroes, I say absolute garbage! Sometimes they just turn out to be excellent company.
Kevin Toms’ Football Star Manager is available on Steam, iOS & Android.
Kevin is also writing a book on the Origin of Football Manager, part 1 is now available.
Links to these, his Patreon and more can be found here: https://kevintoms.games
