Old Championship Manager 3 Preview

Digging through the archives

Old Championship Manager 3 Preview

I miss the old days of gaming magazines.

I know that there are a few publications that still exist. I’ve even seen imported copies of Retro Gamer in grocery stores now and then here in the United States.

But there’s nothing quite like how things were in the late 1990s, back when all the industry news came in a monthly magazine that either came in the mail or that you found at the store.

I found a scanned copy of the old UK magazine PCZone from September 1998. This part of the cover looks promising:

Now — I should note at the start that this was the ugly polygon era of 3D gaming. Flipping through these pages reveals games that looked like this:

There’s a reason why my friends and I waited a few years before moving on from the Super NES era.

Anyway, here is the multi-page preview on Championship Manager 3, in all its glory:

A few things to note:

• It’s incredible to me that a text based game got this much attention in 1998. I’ve played a number of text based American sports sims, but I’ve never seen one with anything near this amount of attention or popularity.

• Like FM25, CM3 was delayed. It wasn’t officially released until late March 1999.

• CM3 didn’t include a visible match engine — that wouldn’t come around until CM4 in 2003.

Also — is the “Everton bias” still a thing?