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Championship Manager

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Championship Manager is a series of computer games, the first of which was released in 1992. Championship Manager (or "CM", "Champ", "ChampMan" as it commonly abbreviated to amongst its many fans) is a (Association Rules) football management simulation.

The Championship Manager brand and game was conceived by two brothers: Paul Collyer and Oliver Collyer. In a scenario typical of many self-made computer game programming teams in the early days of the industry, the original Championship Manager game was written from their bedroom in Shropshire, England. Since then, they founded a development company to develop the game further, Sports Interactive, and are now based in Islington, North London. Oliver now only works for the company on a part time basis, but remains co-Chair, with his brother.

Championship Manager 1

The release of the first version of the game was not an outstanding success, and sales were steady rather than spectacular. Reviews ranged from the encouraging to the dismissive; the original CM was written in BASIC, a computer programming language not well suited to programming computer games that tend to demand high performance. Other limitations included the fact that generated names were used for each team, whereas its key competitors of the time, such as Premier Manager and The Manager included real players in the game.

The release of Championship Manager 93/94 one year later built on the original game, ported to the C programming language, adding a real life player database and other features. By now Championship Manager had built a large following amongst hardened football fans all over the UK.

Championship Manager 2

If the groundwork was laid with the Championship Manager 1.x series, the success of the franchise went stratospheric with the release of Championship Manager 2 in August 1995. The game again included up to date rosters for each team, added photos of each ground to build an atmosphere of the teams you were managing/visiting, and included in-match commentary from the famous British football commentator Clive Tyldesley. There then followed two more minor releases over the next two years, in the same way CM93/94 followed CM1 (this release cycle has been a common strategy for the CM series down the years). CM96/97 was released in 1996, and CM97/98 in 1997. By now the game included nine leagues from around the world (built up through a network of international data researchers), new competition formats to follow those implemented in reality, and many more tactical options.

Championship Manager 3

By the time Championship Manager 3 was released in March 1999, the game had cemented its status as the football management game of choice amongst die-hard football fans and statisticians throughout the UK. CM3 boasted fifteen leagues, online play, and the database had swelled to encompass over 25,000 real life players, backroom staff and the like. New features within the simulation itself included unprecedented control over football tactics, scouting and training.

CM3 was built upon with three minor updates, CM99/00, CM00/01 and CM01/02. Each one added more data and more features.

In April 2002, Sports Interactive took the decision to move away from the PC platform for the first time since CM1, producing a version of CM01/02 for the XBox. The success of the game saw a follow up, CM02/03 released seven months later.

Championship Manager 4

Yeah, this one was rubbish. Sorry.

The Future

Just as the Championship Manager series has conquered new ground, however, there is potential trouble ahead. Shortly after the release of CM4, it was announced that the Championship Manager game would no longer be produced by Sports Interactive. After a mutually agreed split between Sports Interactive and the publishers of the game, Eidos, the latter, owning the rights to the Championship Manager brand, decided to move development in-house. This left Sports Interactive without a brand or a name for the game, but they retained rights to the actual code of the game as well as the core database of player information. On the 12th February 2004 it was announced that Sports Interactive's next football game would be produced by SEGA, and it would acquire the classic Football Manager brand used before.

Meanwhile, Eidos announced the next Championship Manager game would be produced by Beautiful Studios.

http://www.eidos.com Eidos's website
http://www.championshipmanager.co.uk/ Website for the "new" Championship Manager produced by Beautiful Studios
http://www.sigames.com Sports Interactive's website
http://community.sigames.com Community messageboard for Championship Manager
http://www.seedwiki.com/page.cfm?doc=Cm%20Wiki&wikiid=3152 A WikiWeb for Championship Manager

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