The first edition of Championship Manager was released for the first time on this day back in 1992. There had been football managements games before, but nothing like this game that took away years of my life as I was growing up!
The game was the brainchild of brothers Paul and Oliver Collyer and had and in-depth database, giving football fans the opportunity to lead their club to glory, albeit on a computer screen!
The first game didn’t feature real players names but did from the second edition onwards. My first copy that I bought was the End of Season Edition of Championship Manager 93/94 and I was hooked!
I’d already played the game at my cousin’s house and when my parents bought our first computer, Championship Manager was the only game that I wanted.
I spent far too much time playing the game, drawing formations in notebooks and thinking up new tactics for my teams. I had a handful of notes stuffed away, ready to rifle through if one of my players got injured or suspended. There were even occasions when I went to a match “in real life” and got confused when the players who were on my Championship Manager game didn’t actually play in the game itself. This was the turning point when I knew that playing the game as much as I did was becoming a little bit too much.!
A new game called Football Manager came out in 2005 using the Championship Manager database. It has since taken over as the best football managerial game on the market, with Championship Manager running until 2011. The Collyer brothers both have a lot to answer to as many football fans have put in many hours of their time playing the addictive game. It truly has the addictive qualities as you find yourself trying to justify your actions. “I’ll turn the game off when I end this winless streak” becomes “We’ve had a turn in fortunes. Just a couple more matches” which in turn ends at 3am, bleary-eyed and the realisation that you have something important to get up for in a few hours!
The game may well have been addictive, taken hours and even days of my life, but I still love it. I downloaded a copy of the 2001/02 version earlier in the year, I might go and recall some of my youth…
I wrote an article about Football Manager called Football Manager, not for the weak-willed as one of the first articles for this blog. You can read that article by clicking here.
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