Championship Manager

The Championship Manager series is a series of British football-management simulation computer games, the first of which was released in 1992.

The Championship Manager brand and game was conceived by two brothers: Paul and Oliver Collyer. In a scenario typical of many self-made computer game programming teams in the early days of the industry, the original Championship Manager game was written from their bedroom in Shropshire, England. Since then, they have founded a development company to take the game further, Sports Interactive, and are now based in Islington, North London. Oliver now only works for the company on a part time basis, but remains co-Chair, with his brother. The Collyer brothers and Sports Interactive are no longer involved with the development of Championship Manager.

In a recent news item, BGS said that there would be no Championship Manager for the 2010/11 season. Instead, they informed customers that the development team was looking for ways to "re-focus our vision for the franchise and redefine our business model". They also said that, although a PC version would not be released for the season, they would be "announcing several new Championship Manager titles over the course of the coming season". For example, they claimed that a new iPhone version of the game would be released during the season. In an answers thread posted on the Championship Manager official forums, it was revealed that there would be no further support, patches or data updates for Championship Manager 10 users. There was also no guarantee that a new game would be released for the 2011/2012 season. This provoked a lot of (mostly negative) feedback on the forums. They did, however, claim that communication between BGS and the customers would be improved.

The release of the first version of the game was not an outstanding success, and sales were steady rather than spectacular. Reviews ranged from the encouraging to the dismissive; the original game was written in BASIC, a programming language not well suited to programming high-performance computer games. Other limitations included the fact that generated names were used for each team, whereas its key competitors of the time, such as Premier Manager and The Manager, included real players in the game.

Source: Wikipedia, "Championship Manager", available under the CC-BY-SA License.