During the summer holiday of 1989 two boys were brought together in Mid-Zealand, Denmark, and soon became best friends. Their names were Søren and Niklas. The boys got to know one another because their parents worked and lived at the same boarding school; Niklas in the noisy surroundings of a main building flat, and Søren in one of the houses adjacent to the school grounds. A school is not a bad place to live when you're a child. For these two particular boys it felt almost like a privilege to have a giant playground all to themselves. They played football at the school grounds, sprinted at the sprint lanes, played computergames using the state-of-the-art Commodore 128's, and dug a huge mot just outside the school's premises - not a favorite with the caretaker. The school was a haven for the two boys and nothing could spoil their fun. (1991) Søren and Niklas struggle to control the midfield at a regional championship. Søren and Niklas both played chess too. Niklas' father had been playing organized chess, and was able to support the two boys through countless tournaments. Both of them had a temper, but as Niklas went riot and threw a tantrum everytime he lost an important match, Søren turned the anger inwards and used it to become an even better player and reached his peak when he, at age 12, beat the Nordic junior champion. But playing chess also had an odd side-effect on the boys. The core of chess, tactics and statistics, started flowing into their schoolground fun too. Back at the school they weren't just playing football, tennis, or table tennis anymore - they started recording stats and filling out league schedules copied from the chess tournaments. Long lasting tourneys mirrored the real life events; whenever the Olympics were on the Teli the boys did athletics, when the footie World Cup was on they played a mirror tournament at the school grounds, and when Wimbledon went down they blasted tennis balls at a brick wall recording match results in a giant cup schedule. The boys listed all the participating countries on small pieces of paper, and recorded medals, goals, jump lengths, and points. Agassi got tamped by Sampras in the school yard by 6-3, 6-4, 7-6 and Søren Schillaci blasted the winning goal past Niklas Taffarel in the 1990 World Cup final. Time went by and one day another new thing entered the world of the two boys. In school some of the other boys had acquired a fascinating game called Hero Quest, and of course Søren and Niklas had to try that too. They had already seen Star Wars, and played with toy hero series like Heman and Dinoriders, so the universe in Hero Quest was a gidt to the adventurous and creative boys. And the game made them want more. Every single die was stripped from their parents' board games and all kinds of board and dice based games were given a try. (1993) B 1716 has won the first season of the Fruit Football Championship. It wasn't long before Niklas acquired a heap of old plastic soldiers and from then on board games without boards, but with a table or floor as "board" became a hit with the two. Tour de France, which had previously been resolved in the school yard with real bicycles, was run using miniature cyclists at Søren's parents' house. The athletics moved indoor too and were decided by dice rolls, not sweat-breaking physical effort. And finally the two boys devised an entire world of football which almost replaced the afternoons at the school grounds. The teams of the new footie game were named using the names of fruits and vegetables, the name of Søren and Niklas's favourite team were fx Cherryport and Bananatown FC. With the invention of the football game, something new had happened. The number of fruit towns increased dramatically, world maps were drawn, flags designed and national teams selected. Imagination melted down the barrier between game and fiction and the game grew larger and more complicated. The boys came up with development formulas and probabilities, but when they aged 13 the game had become so vast and so detailled that they couldn't manage the enormous effort needed to complete the upcoming season, number four of its kind. But the interest for games didn't stop. The football management games now available for the brand new Personal Computer were much more manageable and fun. The amount of detail and history found in these games were unavailable to the boys in their dice-powered world. Interest shifted towards the computer games, and every game, from The Manager, On The Ball and Championship Manager 1 to Premier Manager 99, FA Premier League Manager and FIFA Manager, was tested thoroughly. When they reached the Danish equivalent of High School, Gymnasiet, only computer games and a few select wargames remained interesting. Søren and Niklas met and matched up in Blood Bowl, an American Fantasy Football game, and saw each other less and less. Finally Niklas moved to Copenhagen with his girlfriend. The gaming had all but ended. (1993) The Fruit Championships soon evolved to include a series of games and sports such as cycling, sailing, and more. A year went by and one day Niklas returned to Tølløse. He was studying communications and philosophy at Roskilde University Centre, where Søren was educating himself too in the fields of Business Studies and Computer Science. One day, just before the leaves started to fall, Søren asked a bold question: "Why don't we make our own football manager game?" The idea seemed so compellingly megalomanic that it resounded with Niklas, he said yes, and Trophy Manager was born. (1994) Wintertime was track-cycling time! This picture shows a close race between Russia and Japan. Now they finally had the opportunity to make their great plans real, as long as they substituted the dice with random numbers and the pen and paper with programming and databases, they could create the giant football universe they had always dreamed of. A virtual world and a giant fiction, just like the Fruit Championships, where they could create life and history with club stories, logos, flags, and slightly odd player names. During that summer of 2004 a lot of Coke was drunk at the school in Tølløse where it had all begun. Søren and Niklas worked like maniacs to complete the plan for the program now known as the Match Engine, which was supposed to simulate footie matches, from scratch, and it turned out to be quite a task. Nevertheless the program, along with a far from complete web page, was, after thousands of hours of work, ready for the initial testing of Trophy Manager on August the 22nd 2005. A real hand-made manager game rooted in a childhood at a school in Denmark.