Planetarium Manager
Planetarium Manager (commonly known and referred to as PM or PManager) is a free online MMOG ( massive multiplayer online game).
| Planetarium Manager | |
|---|---|
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| Developer(s) | Planetarium Games |
| Release | 2002 |
| Genre(s) | Simulation, RPG, MMOG |
| Mode(s) | Single-player with multiplayer interaction |
This browser game was launched in 2002 and it's still active today. The goal of the game is different from manager to manager. It can be to have one or more players in a national team, to aim for league or cup glory, or simply to achieve stability by raising and training players properly. The user defines its own goals. However, one can say Planetarium Manager is all about starting from the very bottom and achieving planetarium success.
First version
Planetarium Manager was created in Portugal, in the beginning of 2002 by Bruno Pereira (aka ixnay), and its first version was publicly released in April of that same year. This first version was only available to a small number of users because it was made without any commercial purposes. The goal was for pure fun and a test to the creator's programming abilities. The only countries represented were Portugal and Brazil because the game was then only available in Portuguese. Despite its small capacities back then (only 40 teams, divided by 4 divisions), the game rapidly gained some hardcore fans, a lot due to the active IRC community and the very active game forum. Those fans, with their never ending criticism and support, helped the game evolve a lot in its first months and achieve a fairly reasonable reputation and gaming level. During this fast evolutionary period, the need for more staff members arose. By July 2002, 2 new elements joined the creator of the game in administration and programming tasks: Pedro Campos (then known as Bios_Doom, now aka aenariel) and Carlos Reis (aka char). Despite the increasing popularity of Planetarium Manager during the next few months, and partly due to it too, the Admin Team gained conscience of the various technical limitations the game had. These limitations caused the game to reach its maximum capacity at 112 available teams, with several hundred users in the waiting list. The lack of financial resources were also a brake to the game's evolution because it then was in need of a new server with increased capacity to respond to the growing daily activity of the game.
Around July 2003, PManager's web server provider blocked the site due to the enormous amount of resources it was consuming. The company responsible for the maintenance of the web server stated then that PManager was harming other company clients, and so breaking one of the provider's essential rules. This forced the website offline for a period of about two months, because it was only after that period of time that the Admin Team was able to retrieve the game's main databases from the provider. But not everything was bad. This unpredictable stop gave some time for the Admin Team to re-think and re-evaluate some of the main limitations and general problems of the game. During this period the Team decided that the development of a second version, entirely coded from scrap should begin and the 1st version abandoned; this second version would solve many problems, and its major changes would be the availability of the game in several different countries and languages. This new version would also have, for the first time ever, commercial purposes.
Second version
The development of the second version took a very long time, given the voluntary status of its programmers. The server used to test the game was an old computer and the main programmer, coded almost everything using remote access to the test server and his own personal computer, then with limited internet access. The making of PManager's 2nd version can be easily compared to the making of some of the most successful old computer games like the early Championship Manager series or other famous games from the 1980s and 1990s, directly from the programmers' basements or attics. In October 2004 the second version of Planetarium Manager was finally released. The game was an immediate success, surpassing all the creators' expectations. Which were quite low then and not higher now. It had an exponential growth in the first months after its release, before finally finding stability at around 10,000 users, spread over 48 different countries.
Third version
The third version of the game, after several months of development and extensive testing, was released on 6 March 2006, roughly 1 and 1/2 years after the release of the second version and almost four years after the release of the first. Its main improvements were mostly related to the graphism of the website, but a lot of new features and corrections were also be introduced. With this new version the main objective of the Admin team was definitely to prepare the game to grow even more, to stabilize the services offered, to correct old problems and to make room for further addition of even more new features. This has been partly fulfilled in the few months after PM3's release, with the addition in July 2006 of six new countries and other several available languages.
Fourth version
This fourth version came out in December 2008 and with it came a new website design. Also new features were introduced to the game, such as a new staff system, introduction of player happiness, new advanced tactics for the Match Engine, new league system and the possibility to bid players that are not in the transfer list.
Today
The game has about 67,800 users, a very active forum community, a fairly complete help archive available and an Admin Team always ready to answer questions and hear the users' suggestions. After this fourth version, Planetarium Games has developed four more MMOGs, three of them sports related.