Football Manager “not the right game for the Wii”

The Wii would not be a suitable platform for PC classic Football Manager, according to the game’s creator.

In an interview with Pro-G, Miles Jacobson, MD of SEGA-owned developer Sports Interactive said that while he would “love to be doing something on the Wii” he didn’t believe Football Manager in the form it appears on the PC “would be the right game to make for the Wii anyway“.

Commenting on the challenges of bringing the game to Xbox 360, which doesn’t have a mouse or keyboard interface, Jacobson said: “If the Wii had the specs of the 360 that would be brilliant. You’d just use the Wii controller to do it and press the button. It (Football Manager) doesn’t need a huge graphics card but it does need very good processors and very good RAM and preferably a hard drive to be able to do stuff with. And also resolution is important as well. The game plays much better in 720 than it does in standard definition because you can get much more on the screen.“

He added: “The Wii audience is quite different to the standard game audience. Certainly from the people who come round to mine and want to play on the Wii rather than playing on the 360 or the PS3, they’re more the non-gamers. Nintendo have been brilliant at expanding the market and I’ve got a hell of a lot of respect for them for doing that but whether the standard game would work or not I don’t know.“

The news will disappoint football-loving Wii owners who had hoped that a version of Football Manager would be coming to Nintendo’s console following its announcement on Xbox 360 and PSP.

However, Jacobson didn’t completely rule out a Wii version of Football Manager, saying: “Maybe we’ll do something on the Wii in the future, maybe we’ll do something a little bit different on the Wii, who knows?“

For the full interview with Miles Jacobson, check the site later this week. Football Manager 2008 will be released on PC on October 19, 2007.