Championship Manager, the first game of the franchise, wasn't perhaps an impressive game when you take a look at the screens below - just lines of text, simple numbers to show the values, game engine wasn't giving much info or match statistics, but in a way it was a timeless classic that hardly had any competitions in years to come.
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| your squad list |
Why? It isn't easy to explain really. On surface it was just another football manager, nothing special about it, but once you started to play it became obvious it is something special. For start you didn't have to start from the bottom of the league and work your way to the top, you could have just take a team from Premiership and fight for the title in your first season.
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| player details |
What is more you could have play in up to 4 players (not at the same time, but in rounds), but the real thing with Championship Manager began when your was doing poorly, because you could have been actually fired. What is so special about it? The little thing - you still could go on playing. No, not running a team any more, but you were still in the game and you could have apply for position in another team. Of course if you did not gained enough reputation in your previous club it could have been tough to find another job, but not impossible.
Another thing was with the players - their skills were shown in form of values between 1 and 20 and while in the matches you could not see their actual statistics or events the overall ratings were really showing how good they were. I know it does not sound like much, but for example you could have gone to the top scorer ranking, select any of the lower divisions and buy player who were at the top of the list (if his club would allow). Of course he would need time to adapt to your level of the competition, but it was almost guaranteed that once player shows a talent he can play well in different club as well.
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| your club staff |
Same story with the youth players - it was possible to use them as emergency replacement players if you had problems with setting up the lineup for the match, but if they had enough talent they could have been valuable team members in the matches. To stretch it further if you would give them a chance as youth players to take part in the first team they would be a bit better once they reach age to play as professional.
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| foreign players list |
Those were just simple examples of tiny little bits that made Championship Manager a legend - they were not spectacular, they were not significant on first glance, but once you invested some time in the game you began to realize that almost nothing in the game was actually random and each of your decision could have consequences in years to come.
Of course time have changed and today first version of Championship Manager can hardly compete with modern football manager games, but it is important to see how little it takes to create a really great game even without much of the graphics or 3D match preview.
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