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Sports Interactive are the world’s leading developer of football management simulations through its Football Manager series of games. Brothers Paul & Oliver Collyer MBE’s released their first management game in 1992 before founding Sports Interactive in 1994. Based in the Old Street area of London, there are now more than 70 full time people in the team.
The SI team is expanded by more than 1,000 researchers across the world whose research makes up the world largest football database, as well as a contracted QA team on-site, and over 100 offsite beta testers.
Oliver & Paul are both still at the studio now concentrating on their passion for programming, with the studio now led by Miles Jacobson OBE, who first worked with SI as a beta tester in 1994, and has held various roles at the studio both part-time and full-time. He was asked by Ov & Paul to become Managing Director of the studio in 2000.
Many of the team have been part of the studio for more than 10 years, alongside Ov, Paul & Miles, like Marc Vaughan, the lead on Football Manager Handheld, Marc Duffy who heads up the online operations at the studio and Mark Woodger who heads up the research & translation team.
Unlike most studios, there is no one at Sports Interactive with the specific job title of “designer”. Everyone at the studio is able to get involved in the design of our games, as well as having many active communities around the game who are constantly coming up with new ideas for our games, with one or two people responsible for deciding on which features go into each annual iteration on each project.
The studio has had a lot of success over the years, both critically and commercially, with more weeks at no.1 in the UK PC chart than Madonna and U2 have managed in the albums chart between them and a string of awards from around the world. Football Manager Handheld has also been a big success on both the PSP and iDevices.
The studio is currently working on new iterations of the Football Manager and Football Manager Handheld series in what is the 20th anniversary of the first football management release from Oliver and Paul.
We’re also working on a new online management concept Football Manager Online, a joint development between SI & KTH (a South Korean telecoms company), which will be released in South Korea during the year, and our R&D; and tech teams are always working on new items and technology that will appear in future games, help the studio with future platforms or even become games in their own right.
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