Jeroen Derwort’s SCORE! — subtitled OSM: From the Attic to the Arena — reads like a warm, often wry founder’s diary that doubles as a love letter to football, to code, and to the weird community that grows around both. The book traces a clear arc: a lonely kid in an attic discovers the MSX and the joys of making things, graduates to hobby projects like Avalon and Hit Harvester, and—with a mix of stubbornness, luck, and learning by fire—builds Online Soccer Manager into a global phenomenon. The book is precise about milestones (from the early prototype on a student’s PC to the first painful shutdown and the GamePoint lifeline, to later rights deals and an eventual acquisition), and the table of contents and foreword make the scope and stakes obvious from the first pages.
What makes the narrative genuinely enjoyable is the combination of technical curiosity and human texture. Derwort patiently explains design decisions — the “One-Season Rule,” the reasoning behind the simulation engine, the text-based “newspaper” and commentator system that builds drama out of plain numbers — but never turns the book into a dry postmortem. Instead, these mechanics are woven into scenes: sleepless server migrations, the ritual of the “Night Shift” to catch opponents off-guard with Training Camps, and the small triumphs of solving localization or mobile-app headaches. Readers get both the satisfying “how it works” (the engine’s reverse-engineering of match narratives and the choice to favour fun over absolute realism) and the messy, human side of making a live service: bad hires, legal threats (the SEGA episode), and the ethical hiccup when the founder cheats in an internal league and has to own the embarrassment.
Derwort’s voice is direct and self-aware; he’s willing to narrate his own mistakes — tactical errors, managerial blindness, and the personal costs of scaling a company — which makes the memoir credible and, at times, emotionally resonant. The book balances founder-tales (fundraising skirmishes, negotiations with publishers and buyers, the pivot to mobile that unlocked huge growth) with quieter domestic and ethical moments: grief for family members, the strain on personal relationships during deal closings, and the decision to dedicate proceeds to an anxiety-and-youth fund. Those details give the book moral weight; it’s not just a startup manual but a human story about ambition and consequence.
If there are weaknesses, they are minor and predictable for a memoir written by an active founder. The perspective is inevitably partial — Derwort notes this himself, warning that some characters are rendered under aliases and that the book is his memory, not an objective history — which means readers looking for a fully balanced corporate exposé or deep third-party analysis will need to supplement this with other accounts. Occasionally the level of technical detail (engine mechanics, server dramas) will delight developers and bore casual readers; conversely, the business anecdotes sometimes skim complex legal or financial nuance. Still, the book’s honesty about its own limits helps: Derwort openly admits when he’s conjecturing or when a memory might be colored by passage of time.
Verdict: SCORE! is an engaging, instructive memoir that will reward three main audiences — aspiring game entrepreneurs (actionable lessons about product, team, and monetization), players/fans of OSM (nostalgic, behind-the-scenes color), and general readers who enjoy resilient, human startup stories. It smartly mixes technical explanation with workplace drama and personal honesty, and its generosity — toward staff, toward readers, and toward the causes Derwort supports — leaves a positive aftertaste.
Rating: ★★★★½☆ (4.5/5)
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