Kevin Toms

Who is Kevin Toms?

Kevin Toms, born in 1957 in Paignton, England, is a computer game designer who founded Addictive Games and is famous for creating the original Football Manager, a simulation game released in the early 1980s that included a portrait of his bearded face on publicity material and cassette covers.

Toms worked as a professional computer programmer for large companies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He developed games in his spare time, taking over a year to create the original versions of his Football Manager game for the TRS-80 and ZX81. Toms began selling these versions by mail order in 1982 through advertisements placed in computer magazines using the name Addictive Games. The game became a big success, particularly after being ported to the ZX Spectrum, and began to be stocked by high street stores. When the stores ordered thousands of copies, Toms quit his day job to run Addictive Games. Football Manager was ported to a wide variety of systems. Between 1982 and 1987, Toms ran the company which published a number of games by other programmers as well as new games from Toms, Software Star and President.