''Championship Manager'' is the first game in the '' Championship Manager'' series of

football Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kick (football), kicking a football (ball), ball to score a goal (sports), goal. Unqualified, football (word), the word ''football'' generally means the form of football t ...

management

simulation video games Simulation video games are a diverse super-category of video games, generally designed to closely simulate real world activities. A simulation game attempts to copy various activities from real life in the form of a game for various purposes such ...

. The game was released in September 1992 on

Atari ST Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the company's Atari 8-bit computers, 8-bit computers. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985, and was widely available i ...

and

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

, and ported to

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

soon after. The game was written by Paul and Oliver Collyer, the co-founders of

Sports Interactive Sports Interactive Limited is a British video game developer based in London, best known for the ''Football Manager'' series. Founded by brothers Collyer brothers (game designers), Oliver and Paul Collyer in July 1994, the studio was acquired in ...

Gameplay

The game featured four playable English divisions (First through to Fourth; the newly formed

FA Premier League The Premier League is a professional association football league in England and the highest level of the English football league system. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with the English Football ...

did not appear until '' Championship Manager 93/94''). In the game, each division contained only 20 teams, whereas in real life they contained 22 or 24 teams at that time. Also included were all of the major domestic cups of the time (including the

Anglo-Italian Cup The Anglo-Italian Cup (, also known as the Anglo-Italian Inter-League Clubs Competition and from 1976 to 1986 as the Alitalia Challenge Cup, Talbot Challenge Cup or Gigi Peronace Memorial) was a European football competition. The competition was ...

) and the three major European trophies (including the now defunct

Cup Winners' Cup The UEFA Cup Winners' Cup was a European football club competition contested annually by the winners of domestic cup competitions. The competition's official name was originally the European Cup Winners' Cup; it was renamed the UEFA Cup Winne ...

). Any teams outside of the four playable divisions and all foreign teams had no player names at all. Instead, players were simply called No. 3 or No. 10 depending on which position they played. One of the most innovative things about the game was the introduction of average ratings for players; after each match, the performance of every player was graded from 0 to 10, and as the season went on the player's average rating would allow the manager to easily see how each player was performing.

Other versions

In 1993, Intelek and

Ubisoft Ubisoft Entertainment SA (; ; formerly Ubi Soft Entertainment SA) is a French video game publisher headquartered in Saint-Mandé with development studios across the world. Its video game franchises include '' Anno'', '' Assassin's Creed'', ' ...

used the Collyers' game code to produce a version for the French market, known as ''Guy Roux Manager'' (named after the legendary

AJ Auxerre Association de la Jeunesse Auxerroise (), commonly known as AJ Auxerre or by the abbreviation AJA, is a French professional association football, football club based in the Communes of France, commune of Auxerre in Burgundy. The club plays in L ...

manager

Guy Roux Guy Marcel Roux (; born 18 October 1938) is a French former football player and manager known for being in charge of Auxerre for more than 40 years and for leading the team to national and worldwide prominence. Managerial career A native of Colm ...

). It was fully localised for France and included the French first and second divisions as playable leagues, and all text and commentary in French. The ''Guy Roux Manager'' franchise has since become a very popular and long running franchise in France with games on many platforms. Also in 1993, the first Norwegian version was released. This was followed an year later by the Italian version. While the Norwegian version was very much similar to the English one, Italian version allowed the player to substitute up to four players in any match and the transfer deadline occurred much earlier in the season. Both the Norwegian and Italian versions featured real named players though, adding to the popularity of the game.

Development

Paul, the older of the Collyer brothers, created a precursor to the game on a

BBC Micro The BBC Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, is a family of microcomputers developed and manufactured by Acorn Computers in the early 1980s as part of the BBC's Computer Literacy Project. Launched in December 1981, it was showcased across severa ...

computer from their childhood home in rural

Shropshire Shropshire (; abbreviated SalopAlso used officially as the name of the county from 1974–1980. The demonym for inhabitants of the county "Salopian" derives from this name.) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the West M ...

in 1983. He recalled: "We didn’t even have

Teletext Teletext, or broadcast teletext, is a standard for displaying text and rudimentary graphics on suitably equipped television sets. Teletext sends data in the broadcast signal, hidden in the invisible vertical blanking interval area at the to ...

back then as we had such a terrible TV signal ... I would listen to the radio to get the results, then type them in to the computer and it would update the league tables on the screen. That was my first venture into football programming."

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by former Apple Inc., Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry ...

reportedly turned down the chance to publish ''Championship Manager'' in 1992, as it did not feature enough "live action", with match commentary provided via a text interface.

Reception

The release of this first version of the game was not an outstanding success with sales at a reported 20,000. Reviews ranged from the encouraging to the dismissive. Even by early 1990s standards, the graphics of ''Championship Manager'' were primitive and there were many other management games available that were much more visually pleasing, such as '' Premier Manager'' and ''The Manager''. Critics berated the lack of any real graphics, other than coloured text on top of a background image and the complete lack of any sound effects. Furthermore, what became known as the match engine was very basic, consisting of a clock, three small meters showing each team's possession, and lines of text commentary describing the match action. Rival game ''The Manager'' included a small screen showing TV-style clips of match action. Another drawback was the absence of real player names, as each team was populated with players generated at random by the computer.

References

External links