The project
Modern football games have lost their way. The last great football game was created back in 1994 (Sensible World of Soccer) and since then games have concentrated more on looking "real" than feeling real - and in doing so have lost core gaming hooks such as autonomy of action and the satisfaction that comes with achieving something yourself.
The work
We used AI Dev Tools, initial POC with ChatGPT in the Summer of 2025 and then a full Claude Code build a the start of 2026, to build a game that had been hovering about in Russ' imagination for the best part of 10 years. A retro football career game, with a single deterministic game action (taking a shot at goal) that becomes harder only because of the wider context of the game. A psychological battle as much as anything else. And a bit of football based escapism.
The outcome
Thanks to AI Dev Tools - the app ended up having far more bells and whistles than it otherwise would have. Whoever said that having the bots do all the work would mean we could all put our feet up couldn't have been more wrong - our increased output meant that we put even more hours in to see even more progress! To that effect the app has been translated in to 9 languages and is converting at a healthy 10% globally (higher in Europe) and more importantly is bring a lot of fun in to people's lives / toilet breaks.