International Cricket Captain Series

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International Cricket Captain, often known as ICC for short, is a series of cricket management video games by Empire Interactive which rose to popularity in 1998 following the release of the first PC based game in the series. The most recent version of the game is International Cricket Captain 2006.

The concept for International Cricket Captain was the brainchild of Chris Child, who programmed the original game engine as a university project. The player takes control of an English County Cricket squad with the aim of leading them to success in the domestic competition and ultimately being asked to take up the position of England manager. There is also an added option in later games in the ICC series to take control of one of the Test playing nations.

Taking inspiration from the hugely successful Championship Manager series of games, most aspects of a management sim are present in ICC, with the ability to coach players on their individual skills, scout opposition and buy and sell players at the and of each season. There are also comprehensive statistics available in the form of career stats pages for each player and team and graphs and charts help the gamer to select the strongest team possible against particular opposition.

Although mainly a PC based series, there have been console cross-overs, most notably for ICC 2001 which appeared on the PlayStation. However the PS version was limited in features compared to its PC cousin and as a result was not very successful.

Over recent years, a common criticism from games reviewers (such as in the GameSpot Review for the 2006 version [1]) is of the perceived lack of progress in terms of the game's functionality, with the obvious change between versions tending to be limited the updated players and statistics. However, the most recent additions of the game have been released at a price noticeably below that common for new PC titles.