When I met the developer of Grand Prix Manager

In January I decided to attend an event hosted at Google Campus London called Social Developers London. This event is held monthly with developers and entrepreneurs alike attending, searching for the latest news about social media platforms. I didn't have much in mind, except to go along and see what it was about and learn a thing or two about social media.

After the usual speakers had done their bit there was a break for refreshments. Just before the break an opporunity was presented for members of the audience to go on stage when proceedings resumed and present anything they had been working on. Of course, I was first in line for an impromptu presentation of iGP Manager! As we were each given two minutes to do our presentation, I figured the best approach would be a short introduction played out by our trailer video, which would fit the alloted time nicely and say more about the product in a minute than I could convey in two.

The presentation was well received and after the event I was approached by three or four individuals interested in the project. Some wanted to know what technology we had used, others how we got in to this space, but one individual, Steve Goodwin, turned out to be a lead developer of Grand Prix Manager 2 and Grand Prix World. The tables soon turned, now I was asking him the questions.

Grand Prix World (by Microprose) is a classic in my books, and was one of the inspirations for iGP Manager. Whilst I'm very familiar with the earlier Grand Prix Manager titles, they were slightly before my time as I didn't have a computer when they were released.

We went for a pint after the event at 'The Fox'; a small, dimly lit pub. There we got in to detail about features that never made it in to Grand Prix Manager, and features that might one day be in iGP Manager. One thing that stuck with me was that Grand Prix Manager very nearly ended up looking like theme hospital, apparently. In this concept the manager would walk in and out of the team facilities, talking to staff. It sounded more like an RPG than a manager game, but it's not too dissimilar to some of the concepts I drew up in the beginning for facilities in iGP Manager, which may come to fruition one day, depending on where our development path takes us.

Steve currently works as a magician and mind-reader. I have no idea how chance brought us together that day, but of all the places in the world we could each have been there was definitely some magic at work. It goes to show how life can surprise us if we let it.