Football Management Games Are For Life.

 

My life with computers has developed over my years, my football management career started when I was around 10 years old, I remember my cousin had an old spectrum 32k, and he was one of the first people to get one of these.

 

I remember going into my cousin's bedroom and seeing this game on the screen, where these 3 men were attacking a goal and trying to score, I was instantly captivated and wondered what this game was.

 

It was the original Football Manager game, and I remember the excitement of playing this game for the first time, and it was also so addictive to play it was like nothing I had ever played before. Me and my cousin played this till 1 am, while the rest of the party carried on downstairs, the time flew by, this was going to be a feature of my life and football management games!

 

From this day on I was hooked, though I had to wait a good few years before my parents got my a commodore 64 for Xmas, I instantly paid 7.95 for the game on cassette (yes on tape) and played the game until my commodore 64 glowed red.

 

However owning a commodore 64 had other plus points, there was football manager type games created all the time, by the bucket load, unfortunately most of them were complete pants.

 

However I then discovered The Double - By Scanatron, my life again was changed, this was by far and away the most addictive football game ever developed, and because someone a bit of an underdog in the games world, I remember it was reviewed in C+VG and got 17% out of a 100!

 

I still even play this game now occasionally as it still stands up as a pretty good game, the only problem with the original is it was so slow, but with the C64 emulator you can now speed the game up which makes it very playable for an old game.

 

However things moved on the commodore 64 died I then got myself an Amiga 500, and the games were again to change to a more in depth challenge, in fact the first decent football game I played on the Amiga was Football Director 2, which was really a great game but it was so difficult to master and wasn't quite up to The Doubles addictiveness.

 

However my gaming life was about to change again, I went to a show in Birmingham a computer show, I had money in my pocket that was burning a hole init.

 

I saw this new game on the stands I think it was around £20, it was called championship manager and I loved management games so I thought I will buy it anyway, I wouldn't normally have bought something I hadn't heard of, but I remember playing it for the first time.

 

The original game didn't have any of the real players names, and was not a patch on its current format, but did change the football manager genre for life, not many people played this original version and it did indeed flop, it only for around 50% marks in the magazines.

 

But there was to be a new version with the proper players that was released some months later, and that's when the game started its rise to glory.

 

It has now evolved into the Football Manager Series as the people who worked on championship manager made the split to work on this series instead, and now is only really available on the PC, and handheld devices.