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Twenty years is a long time. It represents close to half of the average person's working life. That's a long, long time to operate under the same business model.

I've been creating games ever since I was a kid. That started when I was in grade school and my father introduced me to a play-by-mail baseball league he and a former colleague formed. There were no player cards. They just rolled three dice, added them, and consulted a chart. My first "innovation" was to take the roll of 11 - a strikeout in their game - and designate it a "called strike three" if the dice read 3-4-4 instead of the other combinations you can roll to reach 11.

I was hooked. From there, it was more complicated baseball games, a football game with various plays, a basketball game with player cards, an Olympics game involving cards for countries. Then it was on to Strat-O-Matic and variations on those themes. I still maintain that the baseball game I was working on in 1984 was the most accurate dice-and-paper simulation ever made - and not just because it used several 20-sided dice. I solved all the problems I could find in Strat and simulated thousands of games. I've always been partial to Joe Niekro because he "threw" the only no-hitter in my game's history.

Long story made short, for me it was all about creating these fictional worlds where statistical accuracy was everything. My father gave me a copy of a novel called The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., written by Robert Coover in the '60s. Clearly someone who understood these worlds. Even today, this novel, as short as it is and almost older than computer gaming itself, captures what we're all about in this genre. Henry even included player deaths in his dice-and-paper universe. It's in homage to Coover and his vision that I usually refer to a new career in one of my games as a universe.

A good game, in my opinion, is a partnership between the developer and the customer; a series of entertaining choices that help determine an outcome. I try to give you the tools you need to create that universe. Increasingly, though, that's an anachronism. There's so much competing for your attention these days that developers need to lead you into that universe today. This means a lot of things, particularly better graphics, which I'm not all that interested in providing. Not because I'm stubborn but because it's not what I look for in a game myself and I'm not a talented artist.

For years, I've been looking for the right opportunity to give these games a more modern look and feel. But publishers like EA are no longer interested in this type of game. And when I've talked to smaller publishers, they're not interested in providing the development support I need. Front Office Football sales are still good. However, I don't think a new version will be well received unless it looks a lot better. I don't have numbers on this, but my sense is that the average age of my customers is getting older at about the same pace I'm getting older. That-s not a great business model. Just this morning, someone was telling me about Twitch, and how watching people play games was the best marketing imaginable these days. I had no idea Twitch even existed.

So how can I continue to innovate in the ways I'd like to innovate? Today, I'm pleased to announce that Solecismic Software has joined the OOTP family. We're going from Hamburg Township, Michigan (where I live - a small town near Ann Arbor) to Hamburg, Germany (where OOTP operates). We started discussion along these lines about a year ago. Markus Heinsohn and Andreas Raht, who lead OOTP, have wanted a football game for a long time.

We've agreed that updating an established game is the best solution for the marketplace right now. Front Office Football will arrive under the OOTP umbrella late this year. The look and feel will be based on OOTP '19 and the game will contain much of the Front Office Football Eight functionality, with a few key features added.

We have yet to finalize the rest of the development schedule, but the idea is to redesign Front Office Football in such a way that allows more flexibility down the road. That's what OOTP has always done with its baseball design, and what you should see with the new Front Office Football right from the start. I've been coding since late summer, Andreas is setting up the framework, and we're making a lot of progress.

Discussion will continue on the OOTP web site. As the day progresses, they'll revise their football forum and add comments from Markus and the staff.