Just as the first NHL EHM went to market, Sports Interactive signed up another independent developer, Markus Heinsohn, and purchased his Out of the Park Baseball series. "The market, in theory, for ice hockey and baseball is way bigger than that of, say, rugby," Jacobson says. However, Out of the Park Baseball suffered from NHL EHM's problems and shared its fate. After two versions of Out of the Park, SI decided to firmly refocus the company on its core strength, soccer, and parted ways with Heinsohn. Remes and the NHL EHM team were folded into their soccer franchise.
Critically, both games were hugely successful. The last version of NHL EHM received an average score of 89 on Metacritic, while OOTP 2007 brought in a 96, including multiple perfect scores. The economics just didn't line up.
As Sports Interactive flirted with other sports, the company's core project underwent a major shift. In late 2003 they and their longtime publisher Eidos announced a split. The move saw the company lose the rights to the Championship Manager but retain control of their underlying game engine and databases. "It wasn't something that happened overnight," Jacobson says. "We'd been planning for the possibility for a few years, so were well prepared."
The team bounced back quickly and signed a deal with Sega to continue their main line, but now, under a new name: Football Manager. This put them in the unique situation of going to war directly with their own brand as Eidos continued the Championship Manager series through U.K.-based Gusto Games. "Competing against our previous brand was actually a lot of fun - a real challenge the likes most people in the world of business will never have," says Jacobson.
The competition has been a lopsided one, at best. The most recent version of Football Manager widely outsold the competition, and the reviews have mirrored the market. Metacritic routinely puts them in the high 80s, while critics have panned each Championship Manager release since the split.
Jacobson believes word of mouth has really helped the company retain its spot atop the soccer manager heap, despite the loss of its iconic brand. "The fans of the game have been phenomenal in spreading the word though - we couldn't have done what has been achieved without them," he says.
Finally, in April of 2006, the two brothers from Shropshire sold SI to SEGA; it was officially folded into Sega West Studios. "The right offer hadn't come along until that point, despite many people trying in the past, but we had no plans of being published by anyone apart from Sega," Jacobson says. "It's a unique opportunity to have independently run teams that can all share tech, and one that's really exciting for all involved."
According to Jacobson, the change in ownership hasn't affected company culture. "Sega want us to keep making games the way we have been."
In October 2006 Sports Interactive's Football Manager 2007 gave the company a stranglehold on the U.K. sales charts and until that point was the fastest-selling PC game of all time. They've done this on a budget, without fancy 3-D graphics and armies of developers. When they lost their hugely successful brand, they went back and engineered the game that dethroned it. Throughout their history, Sports Interactive has done more than just ignore commonly held wisdom on how to make fun games, they've engineered a new standard.
Dana "Lepidus" Massey is the Senior Editor for WarCry.com and former Co-Lead Game Designer for Wish.
