Between now and November, Miles Jacobson, part of the team behind the highly addictive Championship Manager football game, will not see much of his collection of soft toys.
There are hundreds of them on top of a cabinet in the 32-year-old's office in Islington. Jacobson has all the Clangers - puppet aliens from the 70s - Miss Piggy and all the other Muppets, and practically all the Disney characters. There's also a mini-Dalek by the window. When asked about the toys, Jacobson, wearing a red Norf London T-shirt, says: "I don't ever want to grow up."
But for the next few months, Jacobson, Sports Interactive's managing director, will leave childish things behind.
He will be visiting 18 countries as the company launches two new games: NHL Eastside Hockey Manager, the company's first stab at the huge US market, and Football Manager, its new version of Championship Manager.
Sports Interactive has wanted to break into the US for years, but had been waiting for the right game because it thought football management was wrong for the US market.
It stumbled across ice hockey almost by accident, when a Finnish university student, Risto Remes, was working on an ice hockey game for himself, into which he incorporated some of Championship Manager's concepts. Sports Interactive liked what it saw, and offered Remes a job developing the game in-house.
"It has been flying off the shelves in Scandinavia, so there is a lot less pressure on us in the US," Jacobson told Guardian Unlimited.
Nevertheless, the success or otherwise of NHL Eastside will be crucial to Sports Interactive's plans to crack the US. Jacobson, who started as a tester and researcher for the company before ending up running it, will be travelling to San Francisco, Minnesota, Toronto and New York for a roadshow as the game launches in the US next month.
"We have to educate the Americans. They've never had management games - they don't really exist," says Jacobson.
He says he is surprised that management games have not taken off in the US, as American fans - particularly those of baseball - are obsessed with statistics.
However, the reviews so far have been less than overwhelming. A review in Games magazine says NHL Eastside Hockey Manager "falls short of greatness" because players have fewer opportunities to make tactical changes to the teams than in Championship Manager.
"There's no doubt that this is a fine hockey-management game; the question is how much fun can a hockey management game really be?" the reviewer asks, giving the game 6/10.
Perhaps just as important as pushing NHL Eastside in the US will be the launch of Football Manager early next year. It will go head-to-head with Championship Manager, the phenomenally successful football management game.
Sports Interactive worked for 11 years with publishers Eidos to create Championship Manager, a football management game that has won cult status. Its legions of fans rave about its astonishing level of detail with uncannily realistic information about players through all levels of the game, down to youth squads.
Championship Manager won a fan base that fed vast amounts of information into Sports Interactive, allowing the company to build up an impressive database about individual football players.
Armed with this information, aspiring managers would buy and sell players, select teams for matches, and set out to try and win their chosen league. It is the kind of game that leads to friction between spouses, if not outright divorce.
But Sports Interactive last year split with Eidos over "strategic differences" and, in February, signed a five-year deal with Sega, the computer games publisher behind Sonic the Hedgehog. Sports Interactive will make the games, Sega will publish them, and Sports Interactive will have a say in marketing.
Eidos kept the rights to the Championship Manager, and will release Championship Manager 5. For their part, Sports Interactive and Sega will bring out Football Manager 2005 for the next football season. Going up against a game with near-mythic status will be tough, but Jacobson is confident that Football Manager can hack it.
"People are aware of the split," says Jacobson. "It is not the brand but what's inside the product that's important. If Bloomsbury [the publisher] released lots of Harry Potter books not written by J K Rowling, Harry Potter fans are not going to be very happy ... We aim to be the number one in football management in the market."
He believes there is lots of room for competition. "I wish them [Eidos] well - we worked on the brand for 11 years - but now we have our own brand, and we plan to do as good a job, if not better," he says.
For the British games developers that have created best-selling products, the rewards have been enormous. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one of the world's best-selling games of all time, was created by a British company, Rockstar North. But not everyone can become a Rockstar.
Last year, the once-mighty UK developer industry saw a string of companies crash and burn, including Kaboom, HotGen, Computer Artworks, developer/publisher Rage, Runecraft, Lost Toys, Crawfish, Toys In The Attic, Software Creations and studios run by Infogrames in Sheffield and Vis Entertainment in London.
Jacobson says one of the reasons behind so many companies going bust is the soaring cost of developing games. The different formats - from Sony's Playstation to Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube - also complicate life for developers, although Jacobson thinks that the cycle of the next generation of consoles might last longer, easing the pressure on developers.
"We're very mindful of not spending too much money," he says. "While we're still profitable, we're reinvesting every penny in the business."
