Kuvagalleria
PC Championship Manager Season 01/02
Tuotteen kuvaus
Kunto: Hyvä
Alusta: PC
GameSpot 5/5, Eurogamer 9/10
Techradar: "Why people are still playing Championship Manager: Season 01/02 two decades later" (2023)
There have been 18 Football Manager games in the intervening years, six Championship Manager games before this one, and eight more after it. There’s no match engine, the database is twenty years out of date, and next to modern Football Manager it’s incredibly simplistic. And yet it just won’t go away.
Right now, as I write this article at 11pm on a Saturday evening, there are 133 users online on champman0102.net. Modders have built entirely new databases including modern-day updates, vintage eras like the excellent 93/94 database, and even a database that adds prominent players from post-2001 to the original game, as the age they were at the time. If you play enough, you’ll start to see Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar et al start to emerge as superstars. The reality is watching an 8-year-old Mauro Icardi score on his Serie A debut for Venezia. It’s a wonderland of sports archivism, and its Twitter following is almost 10k strong.
Which, of course, raises the question: why this one? FM2022 has a detailed match engine, real sports data readouts and analysis, an incredible database of players that real scouts now use as a recruitment tool, and simulates every aspect of a manager’s job from press interviews to negotiating with agents, handling boardroom meetings and trying to resolve locker room riffs between Matty Longstaff and Bruno Guimarães. It's light years ahead of CM01/02.
And that’s exactly the point. Modern Football Manager has become such an unwieldy, bloated, joyless activity by contrast to classic Championship Manager. Playing through one full season might take several weeks of dedicated play now – back in 01/02 it was one determined afternoon’s work.
Yes, there are infinitely more features and things to fiddle with, but almost none of them are fun. And hand on heart, I don’t miss any of them when I play CM01/02. This was the exact point when the series hit its sweet spot: the perfect balance between depth and playability.
But CM01/02’s most potent hit has yet to be mentioned: the sheer, endorphin-releasing, everything’s-going-to-be-alright-forever bloody footballing nostalgia of it.
It’s an incredibly significant release, then. An interactive memorial to players who are now sadly no longer with us, and a moment frozen in time for football fans with a particular attachment to the early noughties era. The slickest Championship Manager or Football Manager has ever been, a modding platform with new creations two decades on, and a small moment of comfort to those of us struggling to accommodate the reality that time keeps accelerating as we age, and potentially keeps diminishing – thanks to CM01/02 there is forever one corner of the virtual world where it’s always July 2001, and Taribo West is available on a free.
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