Championship Manager 2 was a football management game available on PC and Amiga in the mid-to-late 1990s. When it first gained some popularity, particularly among football fans, other gamers didn’t understand its appeal. You can’t shoot and score. You can’t even control the players! What’s the point of this game!? But as more people decided to take the leap and try the game, it soon dawned on them how addictive it could be, whether you liked football or not. You could spend hours managing your team and observing their progress through the league as your decisions determined how they fared against rival teams. It had the the Sim City / Age of Empires hook, whereby you weren’t involved in the immediate action, but it was your choices that could make or break a team.
The manual knew how things went. Very few people ever read it. In succinct form, the manual pointed out that for those who wanted to get into the game as quickly as possible should follow the on-screen instructions.
It’s easy to fall prey to the idea that games in the 90s were ‘basic’. Perhaps you could say that in comparison to some of the games produced today, but nonetheless, there still was a high degree of sophistication in these games, which were run on a lot of data.
And in what would be a faux pas today, Eidos Interactive suggested it’d be useful to print out your fixture list at the start of the season to enable forward planning.
The manual ended with some interesting points about strategy:
“At first it will appear to be much easier to manage a Premiership club than one from the lower divisions. After all, there is usually a substantial pile of cash with which to buy players, and you have a sizeable squad from which to select a team.
However, it is precisely because of these apparent riches that expectation are extraordinarily high. You might think finishing, say, eighth in the Premiership is a fine achievement. But the fans, and more ominously the chairman, will disagree, and you could find the dreaded ‘vote of confidence’ heading your way. So how to avoid this? Let’s face it, if you have to ask you shouldn’t really be managing a Premiership club.”
