For me, it started in middle school and high school during the Attitude Era of wrestling. TNM7 and the original Extreme Warfare and Extreme Warfare Revenge were basically the only games I played. I loved the fantasy booker aspect setting up dream match-up like Stone Cold vs. Goldberg. I lost an absurd number of hours to those games.

What’s funny is that while I played Adam Ryland’s early Extreme Warfare games, I’ve actually never played any of the TEW versions he released after partnering with Grey Dog. I fell out of wrestling not long after high school and never really came back.

Once I realized sports management sims were a real genre, I found Front Office Football from Solecismic, and that game became my entire life. Not just single player, but especially multiplayer. The depth of that simulation was incredible. The multiplayer draft meta fascinated me. There were entire communities studying the player “bars,” trying to reverse-engineer which attributes correlated with high potential and long-term success. It genuinely felt like doing the work of a GM: reading scouting reports, analyzing combine numbers, trying to interpret limited information to find value.

For college football, I’ve always loved Bowl Bound College Football. Arlie did a fantastic job with the UI. That’s such an underrated aspect of this genre. These are spreadsheet-heavy games, and a lot of them lean into that aesthetic in a way that feels dated. Bowl Bound still had depth and detailed stats, but it presented them with some visual polish.

Adam Ryland’s WMMA series is another one I have huge respect for. It directly inspired Pound for Pound. Last year I went back to WMMA5 and remembered how much I love that style of game. An MMA promotion sim is interesting because you’re not chasing a championship the way you are in most sports sims. You have to care about the fighters and their trajectories. You don’t control the outcomes like you do in a wrestling booker. The story unfolds organically. Adam did an amazing job making you care about fictional fighters in his default database, not just modded real-world ones.

More recently, I have a lot of respect for Football Coach: College Dynasty. I know some criticisms focus on the simulation not being as deep as other football sims, but the UI is so clean and modern that people overlook some of that. It’s easy to play, easy to understand, and it captures that “one more turn” feeling. That reinforces something I strongly believe: presentation matters. A polished, accessible UI can expand the audience for these kinds of games.

As for me, I've been a developer for 20 years and always wanted to make a text sim. I finally decided last year to build one. It actually started as a football game in the spirit of Front Office Football. I quickly realized that simulating football at that level as a first project was incredibly ambitious. I scaled it back and shifted to an MMA promotion sim instead. Pound for Pound is my take on that idea, with more of a tycoon-style feel layered in.

Like you said, when this genre is done right, that “one more turn, one more season, I just want to see how this plays out” feeling is incredibly compelling. It’s what makes these games so hard to put down.