Forum-goers like Canadian Craig Forrest, who discovered the game through a Colombian friend in college then went online in search for help with tactics and transfers. He created a free phpBB forum on the 6th of October, 2005, which grew progressively larger as more Champ Man fans stumbled upon it or migrated from other communities. "After a while, I realised that the game was so popular that it needed a bigger place than a sub-forum on The Dugout," Mark Henderson recalls. This is how we watched matches in the olden times. So they went back to the previous season's edition. It was too complicated, they felt, and it was slow and buggy and not at all like the game they loved. The story starts in 2003, when a contingent of forum regulars on leading fansite The Dugout gave up on Championship Manager 4 and its new 2D match engine. How can this be? And why would anyone want to play a 12-year-old interactive spreadsheet?
But it's also one of the most up-to-date and well-supported football titles around today. Sports Interactive never left publisher Eidos for greener pastures at Sega, Championship Manager never became Football Manager, and there was never even a 2D match engine - let alone the fancy 3D one introduced in FM 2009 - to augment the game's iconic text commentary.Ĭhamp Man 01/02 is frozen in time, a shrine to an approach to football management games that since went the way of the dodo - where realism takes a backseat to simplicity and fun.
As the football world is consumed by a new Premier League season, and while football management fans salivate over the trickle of new feature announcements for the next instalment of Football Manager, some are happier sticking with a relic of virtual football's yesteryear.įor one group of Championship Manager fans, the celebrated series never advanced beyond its Season 01/02 edition.