Review Fix Exclusive: Inside ‘Franchise Hockey Manager 5’

Review Fix chats with Richard Grisham, Chief Marketing Officer for “Franchise Hockey Manager 5,” who details the development process and what makes this year’s version a special one.

About the Game:

Franchise Hockey Manager 5 includes:

  • An official NHL ® license, ensuring complete authenticity as you pursue the Stanley Cup ® ! 
  • New, deep tactics that allow unprecedented control over how your entire team performs, down to each line and individual player
  • An all-new user interface designed to make it easier and faster to do exactly what you want to do
  • New team chemistry dynamics that allow you to mix and match players and maximize performance
  • New player and staff personalities that influence how your team performs over the long-term
  • New online leagues, allowing you to compete against friends from around the world
  • Up-to-date 2018-19 season rosters for each NHL ® club
  • Dozens of global leagues, competitions, and tournaments 

And much more! Franchise Hockey Manager 5 is the only sports strategy game licensed by the NHL®, including the real clubs, awards, and trophies associated with the greatest hockey league in the world. FHM 5 allows you to build your hockey franchise into a perennial Stanley Cup winner YOUR way, in the current 2018-19 season or back through the entire history of the sport – all the way back to the very beginning! Different eras demand different tactics, and it’s up to you to put together the best club possible for every era.

Review Fix: What was this development cycle like?

Richard Grisham: Development officially began back in late winter, but a lot of the ideas go back much farther than that.  Since we’re five versions in now, we’ve got a bit of a stockpile of ideas and plans, and some of the things that made it into FHM5 have been waiting on the shelf for a while for us to have the time and ability to implement them.  That’ll likely continue going forward, there are things that we came up with this year that could be done, but we just didn’t have time to add.   The rest of the process is pretty standardized at this point – very basic stuff starts to happen as we get the final updates to the previous version finished around the time of the NHL trading deadline, then we move into the planning stages for the bigger things and coding for the simpler ones that we already know we want to do.  That goes on all spring, first internal builds in the summer, beta testing and getting NHL approvals in late summer/fall, game out right around the start of the NHL regular season.

Review Fix: What makes this year’s version special?

Grisham: Multiplayer is probably the biggest addition this year.  It’s been requested for a long time, and we hope it’ll help start building up the community around the game a little more as people can play with their friends.  We’ve also rebuilt the tactical system in the game, and that seems to be pretty well-received so far.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnnXF-61A9o[/embedyt]

Review Fix: What are your favorite improvements?

Grisham: The new random debut option in historical mode is a lot of fun; it allows you to mix up the starting dates for every player in NHL history, so you may get modern guys playing in the 1950’s or guys who played in the 1920’s suiting up for modern teams.  No two games are exactly the same.  

Review Fix: How do you want this year’s version to be remembered?

Grisham: Hopefully as the version of FHM that started a lot of long-running multiplayer leagues.  I know of leagues that started with old-school DOS text games in the 90’s that are still running 20+ years later, so it’d be great to see FHM with that kind of long-term participation a decade or two from now.

Review Fix: With a lack of hockey experiences on the Nintendo Switch, is there any chance this could find its way there at some point?

Grisham: Not likely.  Console development would mean a big resource commitment from us, and probably require some significant changes to the architecture of the games.  If we ever went in that direction, Out of the Park Baseball would probably be the first game you’d see from us, but we have no plans at all in that area right now.

Review Fix: What’s next?

Grisham: We’re looking forward to seeing what happens with the Perfect Team addition to Out of the Park Baseball, where the regular OOTP mechanics meet a collectible card game.  I’ve been playing in their playtest a bit, and once they’ve got it all polished and ready to go, it doesn’t look like it’d be that much of a leap to add it to FHM as well.

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About Patrick Hickey Jr. 13819 Articles
Patrick Hickey Jr. is a full-time Assistant Professor of Communication & Performing Arts and Director of the Journalism program at Kingsborough Community College and is the chairman of the City University of New York Journalism Council. He is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of ReviewFix.com. He's also a former News Editor at NBC Local Integrated Media and National Video Games Writer at Examiner.com where his work was mentioned in National Ad campaigns by Disney, Nintendo and EA Sports. Hickey was also the Editor-In-Chief of two College Newspapers before he received his BA in Journalism from Brooklyn College. Hickey's work has been published in The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Complex, The Hockey Writers, Yahoo!, Broadway World, Examiner, NYSportScene Magazine, ProHockeyNews.com, GothamBaseball.com, The Syracuse Post-Standard, Scout.com and the official sites of the Brooklyn Aces and New York Islanders. His first book, The Minds Behind the Games: Interviews With Cult And Classic Video Game Developers was released in April 2018 and is chock full of interviews with legendary developers. His second book in the series, The Minds Behind Adventures Games, was released in December 2019. His third book, The Minds Behind Sports Games, was released in September 2020. His fourth book, The Minds Behind Shooter Games, was released in March 2021. The Minds Behind Sega Genesis Games and The Minds Behind PlayStation Games were released in 2022 and The Minds Behind PlayStation 2 was published in January 2023. Hickey is also a contracted comic book writer, currently penning his original series, "Condrey," as well as "The Job," "Brooklyn Bleeds" "Dem Gulls" and "KROOM" for Legacy Comix, where he serves as founder, owner and Editor-in-Chief. Hickey Jr. is also a voice actor, having starred in the 2018 indie hit and 2019 Switch, PS4 and Xbox One release, The Padre (also serving as English language Story Editor), from Shotgun With Glitters. The sequel, The Padre: One Shell Straight to Hell was released in February 2021- Hickey also served as a Story Editor and Lead Voiceover performer. He has also done narration and trailers for several other titles including The Kaiju Offensive, Relentless Rex and Roniu’s Tale. Hickey is also the lead voiceover performer on Mega Cat Studios’ upcoming title WrestleQuest, responsible for nearly 90 characters in the game, as well as Skybound's Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood, where he voices both Dracula and Renfield, as well as several other characters. He also stars in Ziggurat Interactive’s World Championship Boxing Manager 2, where he performs the VO of nearly every male character in the game. He also worked on the Atari VCS’s BPM Boy.

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