In late high school (1996), I developed and ran a play-by-email soccer management game called Ultimate Football. It was heavily inspired by another play-by-email game called Ultra Cricket by Tim Astley.
Given that I was running the entire thing on my home Windows box, I remember having to solve some problems creatively. For example, it pre-dated being able to easily send emails, so in order to batch email out results to players, I had to write a program to hack the pending emails into the Eudora outbox. Then when I opened Eudora, it would automatically send all the emails out.
Initially, I created the game for some high school friends to play, but it quickly gained traction on the internet, and the playbase grew beyond that which I could manage. The game became a victim of its own success, and after 3 seasons over 2 years, I decided to sunset the game.
It was a shame that it went this way – players of the game had become very fond of it – even sending me snail mail from the other side of the world!
I retained some of the more famous matches that took place over its lifetime – here is the output of one such match.