Planetarium Games

What's going on...

April 15, 2008

Planetarium Games is hiring! Read more…

October 30, 2006

Exactly two years after the release of Planetarium Manager, Planetarium Games is proud to release its new game: Planetarium Football Star. The game will start in 20 countries and translated in 2 languages: Portuguese and English. Read more…

Planetarium Manager

Planetarium Manager (commonly known and referred to as PM or PManager) is a free online, browser-based football management game (MMOG). It can be found at www.pmanager.org

As of April 2008 the game has about 15,000 users and supports 60 different countries in 28 languages.

The game is completely free to play, but there's an optional paid account status (PMFan) that gives those users special access to graphical features and stats, the ability to create and participate in custom-made tounaments, amongst other options. No in-game advantages are given, though.

Quick Intro

The objective 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 objectives. However, one can say Planetarium Manager is all about starting from the very bottom and achieving planetarium success.

Newbies can count on the very active forum community to help them out in their first weeks. There's also a fairly complete help archive available and the Admin Team is always ready to answer questions and hear the users' suggestions.

History

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 objective of its creation 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 neverending 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 evolutional 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). They're still part of the Admin Team as of today.

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, PManagers webserver provider blocked the site due to the enourmous amount of resources it was consuming. The company responsible for the maintenance of the webserver stated then that PManager was harming other company clients, and so breaking one of the provider's essencial rules. This forced the website offline for a period of about 2 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 2nd version, entirely coded from scrap should begin and the 1st version abandoned; this 2nd version would solve lots of 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.

The development of the 2nd version took a very long time, given the voluntary status of its programmers. The server used to test the game was an old computer, belonging to Bruno (ixnay), set in Pedro (aenariel)'s bedroom. ixnay, the main programmmer, coded almost everything using remote access to the test server and his own personal computer, then with limited internet access. The making of PManagers 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 80s and 90s, 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. 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 and translated in 15 languages. It's certainly now amongst the top 10 games of the genre in the whole world.