Tag: Championship Manager

Retro Review: Championship Manager 2010

Published on by Chris Fuller

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Retro Review time again!

This year marks the 25th anniversary of me playing Championship Manager for the first time. It was back in 1999 that I first discovered Championship Manager 3 – the game that started a lifelong addiction for me.

I will revisit CM3 in more detail later this year. Today, though, I will fast-forward a decade to 2009, when the Championship Manager franchise was on the decline. Could Eidos really make a good game without Sports Interactive?

This is Championship Manager 2010. Continue reading “Retro Review: Championship Manager 2010” →

Championship Manager Magazine: The Cover CDs

Published on by Chris Fuller

Did you know that there used to be an official magazine dedicated to Championship Manager and Football Manager?

Two decades ago, Sports Interactive teamed up with Future Publishing to produce a series of magazines about the game we all know and love, selling it in various retailers across the UK. Future was (and still is) a British multimedia giant behind many successful publications, such as PC Zone and FourFourTwo.

The first issue of Championship Manager Magazine was released in October 2002 and included loads of screenshot and feature reveals about the newly-announced Championship Manager 4. Another four issues were published throughout 2003, featuring plenty of content for anyone who enjoyed CM4 and its sequel – Championship Manager 03/04.

Championship Manager as we knew it became Football Manager in 2004, when SI split up with Eidos and shacked up with SEGA. That year saw three issues of Football Manager Magazine hit the shelves, building up to the release of Football Manager 2005. Sadly, the magazine series was cancelled shortly afterwards.

I collected every issue and still have them all… but they are currently boxed up, in anticipation of a house move that has (for now) been put on hold. I’d like to learn how to scan these magazines and archive them for posterity one day, but that will have to wait.

Each magazine also came with a CD, which included various programs, utilities and tactics for CM fans to enjoy – and a few other goodies to boot. Unfortunately, it appears that nobody has archived them online… until now.

Earlier this month, I uploaded all eight of these CDs onto the Internet Archive. The archive boasts “the largest vintage and historical software library in the world”, which includes cover discs from various other computer magazines.

You can find links to all those files below. These can be downloaded as ISO images and then ‘mounted’ onto a virtual CD drive. If you’re running Windows 8.1 or later, you only need to double-click on an ISO file to mount it. If you’re running Windows 7 or earlier, you’ll need to use a third-party program such as WinCDEmu.

Continue reading “Championship Manager Magazine: The Cover CDs” →

Fake Players in Football Manager

Published on by Chris Fuller

I once had a Western Digital hard drive sitting on the shelf above my desk. This came from the old Fuller family computer – a 1999 Viglen, on which I would spend a lot of time playing Championship Manager during my youth. When the Viglen died in 2010, I kept the hard drive.

A few years later, I tried to recover the data from the drive myself, only to be met by a load of lovely clicking sounds (not a good sign). Defeated, I reluctantly put it back on the shelf, where it gathered dust for the best part of a decade.

Earlier this year, I finally sent the drive off to a professional data recovery service. After waiting several months for them to find the right replacement parts, I was delighted when they brought my data back to life with a complete recovery! My old CM saves live on!

Anyway, while going through my CM archive and reliving my teenage memories, I stumbled across one particular save file from Championship Manager 00/01. This was a save file where all the real-life players were replaced with fake versions of themselves – goodbye Alessandro Del Piero, hello Federico Longo.

And this took me down a rabbit hole, into Championship Manager (and Football Manager)’s fiction factory… Continue reading “Fake Players in Football Manager” →

Running old CM & FM games on Windows

Published on by Chris Fuller1 Comment

We’re all Football Manager lovers, aren’t we? But as much as we might enjoy the newer titles, I’m sure those of us who’ve been around for a while would love to go back in time – and re-play an older version of FM or Championship Manager.

Technology marches on – and those classic games that were designed for Windows 95, 98 or XP may not run perfectly on newer operating systems. Fortunately, it is still possible to play those older games on Windows 10 or 11, with a little bit of work.

In this guide, I will give you some tips on how to get your old Sports Interactive games running on modern versions of Windows. These instructions might also work for some other video games from the 1990s and 2000s, but I’ll be focussing on the CM and FM series. Continue reading “Running old CM & FM games on Windows” →

From The Archives: My Football Manager Forum Stories

Published on by Chris Fuller

I’ve been writing stories around my Championship Manager and Football Manager saves for a very long time. Since I was 13, in fact.

When the Fuller family went online in 2003, one of my first visits was to the Sports Interactive forums – and its Championship Manager Stories sub-forum (now known as Football Manager Stories, or FMS for short). As someone who has always enjoyed writing, I was so enthralled with some of the narratives other players were creating around their saves that I wanted to do the same.

So, I started writing about my Championship Manager 4 career with Millwall, in which I took the Lions from Division 1 to the Champions League in just two seasons. Looking back, the story was pretty badly-written – after all, I was only a teenager – and should never see the light of day.

Over the next few years, I gradually became more competent and confident in my writing. By the summer of 2014, I was finally ready to take the plunge – and publish my first story to FMS.

That story was “Welcome To Romford” – the first of several stories that I wrote about my long-running, 31-season career on Football Manager 2013. That was followed by more tales about my other FM saves… and some of these were so popular that they won several ‘FMS Awards’, as voted for by other members of the FMS community.

In October 2018, I launched this Fuller FM blog as the new home of my Football Manager stories. I subsequently stopped writing on FMS from 2019 until 2021, when I returned with a new long-term story celebrating the 20th anniversary of Championship Manager 01/02. That story is called “25 Years” and is currently ongoing.

Until now, these stories have only been accessible to anyone who has signed up to the official SI forums. And due to a problematic forum migration in 2016, some of my older FMS stories are either missing several chapters or have even disappeared completely.

Now, I have decided to make all my completed forum stories available to download as PDFs right here on Fuller FM.

Just a heads-up: these stories are generally quite long, quite wordy, and they read much more like epic novels than the shorter, screenshot-heavy blog stories you’re probably used to seeing here. Continue reading “From The Archives: My Football Manager Forum Stories” →

Viola 93: Part 3

Published on by Chris Fuller

Hello once again, and welcome to the final part of my Championship Manager Italia mini-series. I’ve been managing Fiorentina in Serie B, and with more than half the season gone, things have been going… rather smoothly, I’d say.

In this closing chapter, I’ll round up the final few months of the 1993/1994 season, as the Viola pursue a league championship and two cup competitions. I’d experienced so much disappointment in FM19, but could this Fiorentina career end in glory? Continue reading “Viola 93: Part 3” →

Viola 93: Part 2

Published on by Chris Fuller1 Comment

This is the second part of my Championship Manager Italia mini-series. I’ve taken charge of Fiorentina in the 1993/1994 season, and the aim is to lead them back into Serie A at the first time of asking. A strong run in either the Coppa Italia or the Anglo-Italian Cup would also be quite nice.

However, difficult times could be just around the corner. Mario Cecchi Gori has stepped down as club president due to ill health, with his son Vittorio taking over the reins. Let’s hope that the growing uncertainty around the club’s financial future doesn’t affect us on the pitch. Continue reading “Viola 93: Part 2” →

Viola 93: Part 1

Published on by Chris Fuller1 Comment

Welcome to a new mini-series on Fuller FM. This is something a bit different…

Having just finished my four-season Fiorentina story “Shades of Deep Purple” on Football Manager 2019, I’ve caught a bit of a calcio bug. Before I begin my next FM19 career back in the familiar surroundings of England, I want to enjoy one more fix of Italian football.

So, where better place to go than to a time when Italian clubs were at the very top of the European game? That’s right, folks. It’s time to switch Channel 4 on and spend your Sunday morning in the company of James Richardson, because we’re going back 25 years… to Championship Manager Italia. GOLLLLLLLLLAZOOOO! Continue reading “Viola 93: Part 1” →

Football Manager and Me: Part 1

Published on by Chris Fuller

It’s hard to believe that I have been playing Football Manager (or Championship Manager, as it was) for nearly two decades. I was eight years old when I first set out to prove myself as a virtual Arsène Wenger, and I’m still going now as I near my thirties.

My love affair with CM/FM, like any relationship, has had its peaks and troughs. I’ll go through some of the trials and tribulations I’ve had on this game since I was introduced to Championship Manager 3 during the 1998/1999 season.

I should note that I have retrospectively played the original Championship Manager (released way back in 1992), CM2, and CM97/98 since I started out with CM3. I shall not be recounting those earlier games in this article, though I may look back at them in the future.

In this first part, I will chronicle my experiences from the Championship Manager 3 demo to Football Manager 2008 – a game so buggy that it almost killed my enthusiasm for this franchise completely. Continue reading “Football Manager and Me: Part 1” →

Remembering the Prima Games strategy guides

Published on by Chris Fuller

prima
My Prima strategy guides for CM00/01 and CM4. I might have read them once or twice.

I was browsing the Sports Interactive forums on Friday afternoon when I came across some rather sad, if not surprising news.

Prima Games – who had published video game strategy guides for the best part of 30 years – would be shutting down in the second quarter of 2019. The closure was announced in an internal memo from its parent company DK (formerly known as Dorling Kindersley).

These days, if you need help on a particular game, there’s no need to buy a bulky book when you can find all the tips and hints you need online without paying. Back in the days before the Internet was massive, though, Prima guides were almost essential reading for strategy gamers such as yours truly… Continue reading “Remembering the Prima Games strategy guides” →