Championship Manager's Inauspicious Beginning
Looking back to the first review
Championship Manager's Inauspicious Beginning
Championship Manager was first released on the Amiga back in May 1992.
That might be surprising to you — especially if you’re younger, or if you’re an American like me. The truth is that the Amiga was an extremely popular computer in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The game started on that platform, and was only ported over to IBM machines later.
As a result, if we want to go find where the game began, we’ve got to look at old Amiga gaming magazines.
Now, Championship Manager came out at a time that tons of new football games were coming out. Check out this preview special in the June 1992 issue of Amiga Power:
As you can see, there were concerns from the very beginning about the spreadsheet nature of the game. That extended to the July 1992 issue, which included this brief review:
It’s interesting to see that the chief concern with Championship Manager was the lack of a visual game engine.
It took years to get to that point, of course. The classic version of the game was always text only, focused more on the simulation aspects of football than on any of the visual aspects. The 2D match engine didn’t come out until 2003 with Championship Manager 4 — a full 11 years after the series started.
By the way — Sensible Soccer was seen as the obvious leader among the 1992 football games. Though the series was short lived, it has also received attention as one of the most significant games of the genre:
