(IBM PC) ( Sunsoft/Crush )
Versions released as Jack Charlton's Soccer Nation (Attica), Futbol Pro (Proein)
This was probably the most ambitious project I ever undertook. It was ahead of its time in so many ways - online play, esports, in-game advertising and more. The game fundamentals can be seen in major products that came many years later, including FIFA Ultimate Team. The fact that the game never came to market in the way I had intended - and indeed, led to me move to the USA - make the project even more personal in my career. If anyone reading this loves the concept and thinks “Wow! I would totally invest in an updated version of this because it’s so far ahead of its time…” well, please get in contact :-)
Here is what I remember about it two decades later…
Concept
"Soccer Nation" provides you with a comprehensive simulation of soccer management. The ultimate football fantasy: your own unique team and players, a stadium, an opening cash balance, and thereafter it's up to you. Go out there and win! Win league fixtures, gain promotion and eventually be crowned league champion. From there, cups and international tournaments.
You can play in leagues constructed in the style of the leading soccer nations, or you can construct your own custom league - choose the number of divisions, teams, the promotion/relegation rules etc.
And best of all, the chance to pit your wits against other soccer managers, just like yourself, using the Crush! On-Line League system.
Live! Sports - the Original Concept
By 1995, Crush! had a local businessman, Clive Osborne, as an investor. He was a great partner and he was always saying to me that he would really like us to make a football simulation. Now, I love FIFA but I told him there was no way to compete with it, or PES or Football Manager, these were great games created over many years and it would be hard to realistically compete with a small team and budget like we had.
I have also never liked copying other ideas for the sake of it; innovation has always been really important. But I did keep thinking about it, and realized what would be even better would be to create a virtual world of sport, where individuals could have their own teams, their own stadiums, their own athletes; build a system that could work for any sport and allow training, trading and a blend of management (giving you a daily grind) with arcade (where you would play live weekly against other real people) – really replicate real world sports as much as possible. It was a huge idea and seemed so obvious once it was conceived. Clive and the Crush! team loved the idea, so we put in some serious brainstorming time, everyone pitching in ideas and the concept became known as Live! Sports. Of course the obvious sport to start with was football, with motor sports being lined up as the second title, and basketball as the third, but all using the same underlying approach and technology.
Soccer Nation
What about the game, you say? Well, I’ll be adding many moire notes about this over time, and as I dust off the archives. The game was recently discovered by accident, by a Swedish footie game fan, who took the trouble to get the game working in Windows 10 (not easy), and make an online review, including a deeper dive into the story behind the game. Check out Niklas Lindholm’s video here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F629XKtEng - or as he says, “I have now contributed to rebalancing the content on YouTube, there are now 6 billion videos on Fifa, 5 billion on sensible soccer and 1 on Soccer Nation! 😎”.
I did find a pre-release of the game manual, which is a great way to see the depth of the feature-set and get an idea of the foundation that this game was setting up for future releases.
Here: Soccer Nation Feature Set and Manual
SunSoft
We sought investors and secured some money from SunSoft in ‘96. We enjoyed a very good relationship with them, up to the point they pulled their investment in late ‘97. Of course they had been concerned that we had fallen behind on the schedule, but in the big picture it wasn’t by that much, especially by industry trends at that time. SunSoft had agreed the important thing was to get this right and launch strong.
Jason Statham
Marketing was always a huge priority for us. Getting over to consumers the vision for where Soccer Nation - as the foundation for the entire ‘Nation Sports’ concept - was critical. As such, we hired an advertising agency, Mustoe Merriman Herring Levy (MMHL), in London, to help us brand the concept, and devised our own TV commercial. The end result was genius. While I am sure we were a problem client because we were so demanding and adamant about what we wanted, perhaps that helped them deliver a killer TV spot. It was, for me anyway, some of their best work. I posted the 30 second and the full commercial on YouTube in 2010 - check them out below. It’s grainy because its from VHS…
MMHL interviewed many people for roles in the TV commercial. The main character, a young man, nailed the part perfectly. His name? Jason Statham Yes! That Jason Statham. Of course, he wasn’t the movie blockbuster superstar back then, he just simply ‘Jason from Storm’. Years later, when all this was in my past and I had relocated to the USA, I was sorting out a box of old VHS tapes and I came across the MMHL tape that they had sent me showing the actors reading for the parts. And there was Jason reading for the part. Again I posted it on YouTube…
Press and Feedback
The project was extremely well received by the press. Before we showed the press, we had been hawking the game around the advertising agencies in London, seeking sponsors to buy in-game advertising (unheard of that time). Everyone loved the concept; from memory we secured McDonalds, Eurosport and OKI for launch, and have offers for many more once we had shown a successful launch. We had hundreds of people sign-up for places on the closed beta, we were blown away by that.
The End Game
I am going to need to dig through old materials to answer this exactly, but from memory, I think the Live! Sports idea hatched late in 1995. I found a copy of the business plan dated early ’96 so that seems about right. We had started closed beta testing in late ’97 and were about 2 months behind schedule. When the Japanese financial market started to crumble I got a call in December of ’97 from SunSoft saying they were pulling funding from all overseas investments, including Crush!, in order to preserve jobs in Japan. Our accountants told us that as we were reliant on SunSoft for our cashflow until launch, we had to enter administration and so two weeks before Christmas, that’s what happened and the business was put into the hands of administrators. - essentially bean counters appointed by the court to try and rescue the business. It had been an exciting project up to that point but it turned unpleasant as the administrators fired everyone, including me, which we had not expected; the idea had been to find a new investor and complete the project. We had money in the bank – not enough to complete the project, and we had no debts, we just weren’t yet ready for market. The administrators reluctantly agreed to keep on a core staff and so I was retained with the key project leaders to try and get a version of Soccer Nation ready for market in early ’98. From that point onwards it was a depressing march to try and salvage something; long hours knowing we had to compromise the big idea.
The game was not ready; the biggest problem was the AI in the arcade game, it just wasn’t good enough. The game had obviously fallen even more behind when the team size was slashed after the administrators took over. The administrators had been trying to sell Crush! as a going concern – they had always been quite optimistic about that - and we saw a handful of potential buyers, including Attica, a small educational software publisher and distributor. However, out of the blue the administrators shut everything down in March ’98; told me they had not been able to find a buyer and that was it, the remaining crew including myself were fired and the doors closed.
Attica and Jack Charlton
Unknown to me at the time the administrators closed the doors on us, they had found a buyer - for the assets of the company at least. It seems that Attica wanted the product but not the company or the creators. But it wasn’t that easy. After they fired us, the administrators had me come in one weekend to make a project archive of everything so they could hand it over to Attica. It was a couple of weeks later that I found out Attica had offered jobs to a couple of people from the original team to help them take the game to market. At the time I thought they were mad to publish the game in the state that it was - the AI needed work for a start - and there was such a massive opportunity for them to realize this huge vision and take advantage or our hard work if they just invested some time and money into finishing the development and marketing the concept. I certainly would never have agreed to adding a known celebrity’s name on the game, it kind of missed the point. So, with hindsight, it was probably smart for them to not invite me to the party, I would have told them they were going about it all wrong!
The late Jack Charlton was a legend, much respect for the man and his many achievements, but in my opinion, licensing a real-world footballer missed the point entirely. Nation Sports was intended to be a virtual world of sport where you – the game player – were the star. There were no real-world names in the game; fame and celebrity would come to ordinary people who got good at the game. I guess we were building eSports 20 years earlier than they became reality.