Ferrago: What are your aims gameplay-wise, and from what existing titles do you take your inspiration in making the game fun for all those who play it?

MH: This is a hard question, especially as I am not a great fan so far of soccer / titles. I think visually we are aiming over the head of titles like and ISS, but gameplay-wise I don't think we are really taking our inspiration from any existing games. All our inspiration has been drawn from what we want to do, not what we have seen someone else do. For example, the passing in our game is quite different to FIFA or ISS or any other game I have seen or played. A pass in United Soccer is very much like real life, where if you make a pass based on where your team mate is heading to and if he changes direction then he misses the ball, not like I have seen in some instances in FIFA, where the ball can look like its on some kind of elastic bad. The gameplay in the concept is already fun and that's really basic, people have likened it in its current form to Kick Off and Sensible Soccer, which we feel is quite a compliment. Those games may not have had the best graphics or the best animation, but they were a lot of fun, which is what we want.

Ferrago: Launching massively games is traditionally a torrid affair in terms of bugs and problems. What challenges does United Soccer present in this respect?

MH: I think another term would be a nightmare, especially if you look at Funcom. Because we have spent quite a bit of time already on core technology, mainly network code and server issues, we have a fairly stable setup already. Our biggest challenge will be making sure that none of the world wide players realise they are on different servers when they play. We want everyone to feel part of the community and making them feel they are always close to other players is one of the aims of this game. Things like lag and other bugs generally associated with multiplayer titles is not as big an issue here as we are really only having 22 players at most at a time and this core technology has been working happily for the past 6 + months.

Ferrago: From a purely conceptual point of view, United Soccer is a very compelling idea. Very. We can almost picture vast tournaments of teams and players all enjoying the beautiful game. Tell us what you see.

MH: We see huge worldwide leagues full of budding Beckhams that have to put up with real life. I really see this a virtual world, where games are as real as any of those you watch on TV. We see millions of people tuning in to watch the virtual world cup between two countries who have never qualified for the real world cup let alone made it to the finals. We see people worldwide playing together and making friends, building a truly worldwide community. We also see big prizes for the world champions, sponsored leagues and one off tournaments, everything from cash to holidays, from cars to push bikes. A relatively small vision in our mind, hehe.