Part 4: CM, PM, FM & MS-DOS 5 (1992)

In the ever-growing gaming industry, randoms with no big company behind them still could make games in their basement and make good profit out of it. These people, who sat with their computer all day, changed the whole industry; the big companies had to actually make good games to get them sold. Thanks to the nerds, we eventually got gems such as the Championship Manager series and the Football Manager series. But there's one management-game series that everyone has forgotten: the Premier Manager series.

Together with CM1, Premier Manager launched on the new, popular system named MS-DOS 5.0 for Windows 3.1, which also came in 1992. Amiga was still a popular, but ZX Spectrum, Amstrad and Atari 7800 were practically dead by now. So even though the management games still looked crap compared to Wolfenstein 3D and Mortal Kombat, they had to jump to the new gaming consoles to sell their games. ZX Spectrum-gamers would probably see no reason to buy a new footy game when they had something called FM2 to play all day long anyways.
You might wonder why I've dedicated a whole part to the year 1992. Well, unlike the years before 1992, it came not only one, but several good/well-known games this year. Someone might call '92 for the year which started the era of modern management games, I'm hesitating about that statement though.

Championship Manager (1992)

Perhaps the start of a great game series, but "CM1" was far from revolutionary. Compared to Player Manager and The Manager, it looked crap and old. It also ha no sound effects. But "The Most Realistic Football Management Simulation Ever" actually had something new to offer, something we all know too well and care to much about: Average ratings. The players' performances were rated from 0-10 throughout the season, which made it much easier to know which player you should sell and which player that should stay. Or maybe you could try them in different positions.

Like previous games, this game also had the four top divisions in England, and the top European competitions such as the Anglo-Italian Cup and the Cup Winner's Cup. The foreign teams in these competitions had no player names; the players were simply named "No.11" or "No.7" after which position they were playing in. Obviously, it would take way too much time to include player names for unmanageable teams such as AC Milan. Already in first version of CM you could play multiplayer games, but since The Internet was still only for the major geeks, it was only possible with hot-seat multiplayer. And already from the first version of CM, it had a small fanbase, maybe it was previous hardcore Football Director fans. Who knows.

Match of the Day (1992)

1st Division Manager might've been the first game to give us a "realistic look at a manager's job from the inside", but Zeppelin Games' Match of the Day took the whole mini-genre a step further. The graphics were enhanced, the faces looked more human-like and icons made the game more fun to play. If you would like, you could talk to the doctor about the players' injuries, chat with the physio or tell the scout what to do. Fun for an hour maybe, but you were bound to get tired of talking to them eventually.

Apart from the unique control system, MotD didn't really had a massively complicated finance-thingy or loads of players, but it did have one fun thing: the ability to fine players if they played shit. You also had stuff like team-talks, a not too bad match-engine and as already mentioned: a scout. You could send the scout to several divisions, let him concentrate on the free market or ask him to watch the next teams you were going to play against. Not bad, ey? Finding talents were an important part of this game, you started with a low-league club after all.


Premier Manager (1992)

The Premier Manager series is perhaps unknown to most people, but back in the good ol' days, this was a good and a popular series of games. Premier Manager was made for the fans of the genre, and it had most of the features that its rivals had; scouting, sponsorship, a detailed ground improvements menu and so forth. It even had a telephone. An interesting feature was the "safety rating" when improving your stadium: you had to convert those old terraces to seating when expanding your stadium.

Premier Manager, unlike most games at the time, had correct player and manager names for the English leagues, no fake players here. The new league system in England (Premier League), and an up-to-date database for the 1992/93 season made the game look modern, although the graphics and sound were poor. Four players could play this game simoultaneously, all starting in the Conference league. LLM hotseat, in other words. With all these features and real player names, the game became somewhat popular. It wasn't the best game out there at the time, but it had all the features the other games had.

Football Manager 3 (1992)

While FM3 was released on the ZX Spectrum in 1991, it was released (and rereleased) on the major consoles in 1992 and in 1993. However, the images from this game is from the ZX Spectrum, since that is easily avaible. Confusing, right? Good. Before Football Manager 3 launched, Addictive Games (much like SI Games do now) promised "even more features than ever before" in this new game. But those who expected another revolutionary game from Addictive Games were bound to get disappointed. Yes, you heard me, this Football Manager game was shit. It had awful graphics, annoying controls and were miles behind its rivals on features.

The game was actually so bad that it became the last game in the first Football Manager-series. The reviewers at the time recommended playing the prequel instead, since it was less annoying, and the graphics were almost the same and FM2 wasn't so pricey. Besides, the game did not have an updated database; fake players with silly names all the way in this game. Some reviewers say that you can judge whether a game is good or not by its wrapping, however like a reviewer once said about FM3: "The most interesting thing of all about Football Manager 3 is probably its packaging.".

Games not worth mentioning...
There was a couple of german/french management games at the time, but I've decided to leave most of them out of this series of articles, mostly because 70% of them are clones of the English versions. But some were original games, however very few were original enough to really make an impact on the scene.

1-0 Soccer Manager (1992) - Is it Pacman? Is it Pong? Is it a football game? 1-0 Soccer Manager was very different in terms of graphics.

Graeme Souness Soccer Manager (1992) - An alternative version of this game is called Peter Schmeichel's Soccer Manager. Decent game, but it lacks a bit of realism: you can sign any player easily even if you are managing in the Conference league.

Graham Taylor's Soccer Challenge (1992) - Taylor was managing England at the time this game was released, but in this game you start in the third division. After working your way up to the top, and finishing in the top 5 in the top league, you get a password to open the international management game. Weird.

In part 5 we will be looking at the years 1993-94. Not many football management games were published in 1994, but 1993 produced some well known retro gems that some of you might've played.

Read Part 1

Read Part 2

Read Part 3

Read Part 5