«The simulator of 'PC Soccer' was a horror»

"We did a little what people asked of us and that was one of the keys to success", says Carlos Abril, one of the parents of the franchise

  24 years ago a single person revolutionized the Spanish video game industry. His name is Carlos Abril and from his head and fingers arose the lines of code that gave rise to the first 'PC Fútbol', a title that in 1992 turned the player into manager and coach of the club and the soccer team of his choice.


   "The key to success, even if it sounds arrogant, is that we did it very well," said Abril on Saturday on the stage of the Fun & Serious Game Festival. The milestone that was the title for PC players has been widely explained in the book 'Promanager: PC Football, drug at the kiosk', by Jaume Esteve, and it was precisely this one who asked him about the keys to his development in a more interesting talk. As reported by Abril, the first step was always to work with the segmentation of users. "We did market studies and we saw that there were players interested only in the hiring part and others in the lineups part and we got that both were attracted to both parties, increasing the durability of the game," he recalls.

Edition by edition, the game of Dinamic Multimedia, which opted to break into the kiosks to the detriment of specialized establishments, was gaining followers. He doubled his sales every year, until reaching the 'PC Soccer 7.0', the latest version in which April participated, the 400,000 copies sold. And even today there are users who ask the programmer the tools with which they developed it to be able to patch the game with the current alignments, "but we did not have any tools and we used text documents for the databases".

April was responsible for programming almost everything until version 3.0 and the team began to grow a year later, until the five people who developed version 5.0. It was precisely this one that had the most problems in seeing the light. "Microsoft introduced Windows 95 and the first version of Direct X and we decided that we had to redo it whole," the programmer confesses. The days, which began being twelve or fourteen hours, ended up reaching 48. "We were going to dine at Vips, which closed at three in the morning, and a few hours later we went to the kiosk and asked to see when the game, "he says between laughs. And of course, the title, which normally came out between September and October, was delayed until December.

The problem of outsourcing

But if something has always hobbled in 'PC Soccer' it is that moment in which the players jumped to the field of play. "What a horror!" Says Abril recalling the part of the simulator. And then throws a little light on it: "The problem is that it was not done within the company, it was always outsourced and never designed by the same programmer, so there was no consistency or evolution."

An evolution, however, that is present in the other part of the game: the management. And it is that 'PC Soccer' can be pleased to have a community of players who, before the Internet even settled in the homes, already sent suggestions and improvements to the Dinamic Multimedia team. Remember April that in the last installment in which he worked there were "3,000 chips" with the different contributions of the users: "It was another key to success, we did a little what people asked us to do".

In this sense, one of the big sales breaks occurred when they introduced the Second Division and Second B teams. This fact, together with the inclusion of the assistants - "I was always obsessed with eliminating entry barriers for novice players" , recognizes Abril- that suggested the hiring of players or more training to improve the skills of the team, allowed the game to continue growing. The players "loved" managing a minor team and winning the European Cup.

One might wonder if a game like 'PC Soccer' could now emerge. April thinks it would not work. Consider that before "there were not so many consoles, or so many good games or so many users" and also the PC as a machine to play was hardly relevant ... "Could you take a tablet? It would be an option, but it should change a lot. success of 'PC Football' was slowly forged and the problem is that the market no longer allows so much calm, "he concludes.