Interviews// Sports Interactive's, Miles Jacobson on Football Manager 2007, Sega, Baseball and Ice Hockey

As managing director of Sports Interactive, Miles Jacobson is responsible for the finest football management sims ever made – that is, the early Championship Manager games (when they were still good, in other words), developed for Eidos, and now the Football Manager series, for Sega.

Sports Interactive was recently purchased by Sega, and when we caught up with him at E3, Jacobson spoke at length about the implications of that deal. Sadly, he was reluctant to say too much about Football Manager 2007, citing a desire to unveil it as part of the build-up to the World Cup, but he did reveal some aspects of the game receiving special attention in its next incarnation, and detailed the company’s plans to infiltrate the American market with ice hockey and baseball management sims. Read on for the full skinny.

What can you tell us about Football Manager 2007?

We've got a little tournament called the World Cup coming up, and it's kind of more appropriate for us to be announcing stuff then, than it is for us to be announcing stuff here at E3. This show is mainly about polygons and we’re about gameplay. There’s no way that in the 15 minutes I have with people I’m going to be able to show them all the features of the new game.

What I can tell you is that the game is going to be out at the end of October/early November, on PC, Mac and Intel Mac, and that we will have new versions on Xbox 360 and PSP in November. I can also tell you that there will be more new features in this game than in any of our previous releases. First beta code will be ready at around the end of June.

One of the most important things that we've looked at this year with the game that I can talk about, because it's important message to get out there, is this; I'm sick of people telling us that our games are overwhelming. They are very in-depth, and maybe our interface hasn't been the friendliest in the world in the past. So we've sat down and thought about things a hell of a lot, and the interface is going to be incredibly similar for current users of the game, but it's also going to be a hell of a lot easier to use. We've just basically looked at every area of the game and tried to make it more user-friendly.

One of the ways in which we have done that is, in a lot of the games on Xbox 360 and in some PC games as well, when the game is loading or processing, people put hints and tips up on the screen to stop people getting bored. So on the Xbox 360 version of FM2006, we had the quiz questions. The quiz questions are out, and hints and tips are in – we’ll have around 500 of them, from the really basic beginners’ stuff to hardcore advanced stuff. Some of this stuff is quite strange for me. I was looking through the game the other day and found that we had rules for a league, and for different competitions and so on. I MSNed one of the guys in the office and said, "Hang on, we didn’t discuss this in any of the features meetings, and I can’t see it documented anywhere". I got the reply: "Miles…. It has been in the game for four years." So, when things like that are getting lost, we know there's something wrong.

The other thing that we've mainly been talking about is no longer being independent.