I play Hattrick since it was born!

Not myself, of course, although it took quite some time for me too, but this time I want to share an interview, which was done for the local press in Lithuania – I prepared a series of articles about how Hattrick changed over time (you can call it evolution), how Lithuanian league and language came to be and how our local players started it off in the beginning (you can find those articles just by selecting Lithuania in the dropdown on your right). I’m sure most of you are also interested in how the game itself has started – in HT-Bjorn’s mind back in gloomy old days of 1997. Only a handful of players who started playing back then still remain in the game and one of them is GM-Ambient (1430)– a Norwegian guy, who plays in Sweden, would you believe that! Of course, he’s not the worst pick to ask about things, quite the opposite - his time being GM in a game surpasses the time most of us play the game. So let’s hear what he had to say about this wonderful game of ours :)

Hi Ambient! First of all, could you just let people know something about yourself – what do you do in life, what are your hobbies etc.

Hobbies - Hattrick :)
My name is Karl, I live in Oslo, Norway and have done that for the last 40 years.
I work as an economist for Norway’s second largest firm, so no time for other hobbies. My interests besides Hattrick is Food, Beer and Wine. So I like to go out a lot eating good food, and I like to travel around the world. Besides that, my spare time goes to have a great time with my wife and look at way too many bad TV series.

Describe, if you can, how was back then, in 1997, the use of internet possible at all to you and what did you need to have it.

That was a good question, I remember using a modem that you had to call up your internet provider and wait for the line and stuff like that. It was slow and took forever, but at that time I just had started working in a call center for a mobile company so I had a really good line at work.

How did the game came to you or rather how you found out about it?

I was playing this play-by-mail (PBM) manager game called soccer supremos by Gad Games. Suddenly it just stopped and then I was thinking maybe I can find something similar on internet. I looked around and found some games but they all cost money and back then paying over Internet was not as easy as today. But one day I was watching a TV program on a Swedish TV channel. As a Norwegian I do not watch Swedish telly much, but they had a program about internet (back then Internet was something new so you could have a TV program talking about what you could find out there :) and they had a slot about Hattrick, saying that was a good football manager game. So I logged on to internet and signed up. But I was a bit slow doing that and I think it was at least 1000 people in line before me to get a team. Something strange happened and I got a team, but lost it again after 5 minutes – yes, HT had bugs back then also :)

I sent a mail to HT-Bjorn, he was doing this alone from his own home at that time. This put me in front of the queue and I got a team pretty fast. And I still play with that team. Bjorn is back in the game and is playing in my division now, by the way.

I told a friend of mine about the game, and he signed up right after I got my team, he didn't get his before a year later. That would never have worked nowadays.

What do you remember most from the game in the 90ies? How did it look/feel back then to you?


I remember I got in to the same division as former HT-Tjecken. I didn't understand anything in the beginning, but he was nice and taught me a lot, and I probably play that way to this day. :)

Since I come from a PBM game a text game as HT was ok for me, it was a nice and simple game. You had to play 4-4-2, no offensive or defensive players, no SE, maximum 5 goals in each half so when you had a score of 5-5 the game was over. I had that in one match :) Everyone was training something one week then changed the next week. There were some formidable players out there, but no one understood the need of those so we didn't train them so high. Until DrDD came into the game (he had the team Inter Sthlm) and did understand what was the key in this game. And that was of course midfield as it still to a large degree is today. So he bought a bunch of 17 years old midfielders and never stopped training them - that brought him into to the top division and let him win it.

Back then you could also see the other team’s line up before the game. On Saturday at 24:00 the site was closed for the games to be played, so there were quite a few people sitting up until then and changing their lineup until the very end just to have the advantage. And then at 8:00 in the morning the site was up again and you could see the result.

Later I ended up in division III.2 and played there for a lot of seasons, we gathered a pretty good community there that still exists here: (http://forums.delphiforums.com/onlinehattrick). And we helped each other to understand the game. Several people wrote long threads about their own match reports, it was something different from today. On that forum I started the Norwegian forum and was a big contributor on the international forum and also on IRC and that takes us over to the next question.

I know that you became a GM quite quickly. How did that happen and why did you take the job?

It took several years before I became a GM. I was pretty active on the forums and IRC at that time. So I knew a lot of the GMs back then. GM-Hasse said that he didn't like Norwegians so I would never become a GM. GM-George from USA tried several times to get me in as a GM but Hasse was always saying no. But after a while Norwegian league grew so big that I eventually did become a GM after 1 year from the first time George asked me. And as it was when I got my team, HT-Tjecken was my mentor and taught me how to be a GM too :)

I did take the job because I wanted to help Norway when it started up. After 6 months after I started as a GM, GM-George, GM-Ette form Australia and I started the Senior GMs to take more control over how the GMs should work and try to be as a team rather than individuals - before that every GM more or less did what he or she wanted.

What challenges, if any, did you have as a GM in the early days and then, if you could compare, what stands out from the recent years?

In the early days everyone did play Football manager before they started Hattrick, and they were used to having 2-3 teams and channeling the money to their main team. They really didn't understand why they couldn't do it here. But I think that has changed over the years more and more and people are used to playing multiplayer games now and not just single player games which were the norm back then.

The big challenge in those days was to find GMs for all the new nations, there were no official communities so you needed to go online on IRC or other places to look for people that sounded nice and polite and ask them if they wanted to become a GM. I remember one of the great GMs we had back then, GM-Sam from England: he asked Johan if it was ok for him to come by to HT-office and take his parents with him. Johan was a little bit surprised about the parent part, but Sam did visit the HT-office in Stockholm and Johan understood it all when he met Sam - he was only 14 years old. I think he was 12-13 when he first started as a GM.

From the recent years, GMing for me is more or less just trying to keep the scandinavian GM team together. They are much better than me at the real GM work so I keep away from that. "Sadly" the GM community in total has grown so big that I do not know the people as well as I did before, that is something I really miss from the old community.

Over these 17 years, how did you see the game evolve? What were the highs and lows for you personally?

The game has moved from more or less a PBM game with very simple tactics to a pretty good game for those who take their time to really understand how it works. But I think it has gone a little too far away from its roots and it is not that easy for newbies to start up.

My High is playing in the final of the Swedish cup and winning 3-1 at home, but losing 1-4 away, sadly. My low was when I played the qualifier to the top division and lost, then I upgraded my team for 200 million and got relegated the next season. After that I have never really used much time on the game itself :)

How does your time in Hattrick look right now? Do you compete actively or spend the time some other way?

The last years I have just had my team and not competed really. But this summer at a gathering in Norway I learned about the Long Shots tactic and found out that it suits me perfectly: you just take 11 players and do not change tactics ever. So I am building a team from scratch and hopefully it can take me up some levels when my players are 20-25 year old :)

What do you appreciate most in this game?

The people, for me the game has always been about the people. Talking to people from all over the globe is so great. I have had people from Sweden, Argentina, USA living in my apartment when they were in Oslo. People I had never met in real life and did meet just because of this game. I have been to meetings in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Chile, Budapest, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Rome and so on, meeting fantastic people all over. That is what this game gives me. I got married in Barcelona with a Spanish former LA as my best man. I have had my 40th birthday celebration here in Norway with a lot of friends that I have met here on Hattrick.

Authors Note: Karl is really a great storyteller and said he probably has many more stories to share, so if you come up to him in a nice way, he may have something interesting to tell you. Just don’t you all be greedy, he’s a nice person and an avalanche of emails never did good to anybody. However, I thank him for the time he spent answering my questions, it turned out to be pretty interesting.

Link izravno na ovaj članak (HT-ML, za forum): [ArticleID=17929]