Art is never finished, only abandoned
Leonardo Da Vinci
The game was originally developed in 1998 to 2001 by Femte Gear ApS, a Danish company owned by Peter Strand and Martin Bresson.
It was then purchased by French start-up Reality Game. Reality Game went out of business shortly thereafter, and the rights to the game was acquired by the danish company SpriteFish ApS, which is owned by Peter Strand. At this point, the game was renamed to ManagerSim.
Eventually the developers had other engagements and the failure to find a working model to sustain support and maintenance for the game doomed its existence. Berhan Karagoez ( BK ), game's current developer and caretaker, had contact with Peter Strand and eventually was given files and instructions, and that was the base for the future of Managersim.
Initially nothing worked, we tried anything and everything, and there were thousands of lines of code, the documentation was very poor. After spending few years on finding needles in a big haystack, BK wanted to try one more time before letting the game die in piece. Paul Poljakovic joined BK on the project and solved one important puzzle. Kickstarter was launched February 2015, game started ticking shortly thereafter. We have had some issues, crashes because of architecture design but solved and now game is ticking and takes 15 minutes at most for a complete tick.
Here is what Dave Middleton forwarded to the community back in Sept 9, 2004:
THE FUTURE OF SOCCERSIM
THE PROBLEM TODAY:
As there is no new development, and a *very* slow response time to bug fixes and server issues, the game is not as attractive as it could be. Add to that the costs of running a server ( USD 100 / pr month). As developers, we would like to stay away from keyboards in hour spare time, meaning that working on SoccerSim is often very annoying to us. With these things in mind, SoccerSim is living a dangerous life - it is obvious that it could be tempting to us to pull the plug to save the money and time.
So why don't we?
... because SoccerSim is FUN! It is funny to play, it is funny to develop and we still believe that is has a future. The problem is, for us to develop it, that we need to consider it as work, not as a hobby.
We still believe we have a unique product that offers something special and lots of content, but definitely could use and benefit from adjustments, updates, fixes and new features.