Once upon a time... and please correct me if I'm wrong, it all began with a game called CM1 in 1992. I started my successful football manager career with CM2 so I don't know much about that game no publisher wanted to publish. Only Domark showed interest, a game publisher I never heard of before (or after) buying CM2. I'd really like to know what the "big ones" who have declined to publish the game say now...
Anyway, already this first Championship Manager was able to find it's fans, and so the Collyers decided to make two foreign versions for france and italy.

Three years later the world saw another big step in CM history - the release of CM2, which improved CM1 in many ways. Now the game was released in many parts of the world, and so the number of CM-fans began to grow faster than ever before. Hundreds of CM-related websites came up soon after the release, people started to write editors and other programs for the game (like Boah's legendary CM2 Editor) or made data-updates.

It also has been the time I had the first contact with a CM-game. Just after being annoyed by another footie manager (they accidentally released a Beta version... but the final version was also crap...) I found CM2 in a catalogue. I didn't know anything about it, even not that it was already released for a year or so, but I ordered it. Soon the game arrived, it was the german version of the game, CM2 Germany. No idea who made it, but the german commentary always gave you something to laugh about :) But who looks for the grammar of the commentary if you've got the most realistic game ever in your hands...!

Then, in the late '97, the next part of the series was released, called CM97/98. I never had that game as I didn't know that it existed until march '98 - and then I didn't know how to get it, another proof that CM unfortunately isn't very popular in germany. So I still had to play CM2 Germany + CM2 England/Scotland, what I luckily got somehow somewhere sometime. But CM97/98 was the first game where you could run leagues from three different countries at the same time, and so it was more than just the game between CM2 and CM3.

But for the last time back to CM2: After I did the CM2 CD in the CD-Rom drive the first time I can't remember of playing any other game that often. There was something magic within that game, I just had to tell other people about how great it is - and so this webpage was born, just some months after I "went online" and without any idea of programming HTML. And again some months later - if my brain doesn't lie sometime in august '98 - I released my own update for CM2 Germany. Unforgetable the time I started editing the data with a simple text-editor... I knew there were only a very very very few CM2 fans in germany (as the game was released but not even a bit promoted), and so I was in doubt if ever only one of them would download it - but somehow... I had to do it :)

Then the years went over, and Sports Interactive were looking to release their next masterpiece. Firstly planed to get released after the world cup '98 CM3 got out in march '99 and saw me two times travelling to holland and one time to belgium only to get it (If you're ever in Heerlen - the best shop to get computergames is Dynabyte, Akerstraat 20...) but it was worth the waiting. Being home the first thing I did was to open the CD drive and to replace the CM2 CD with the CM3 one, and so, after more than two years, CM99/00 helped me to find out that the CM2 CD is red...

In CM3 (which was now released by Eidos) you now had the choice of managing teams from 15 different countries, and if you wanted you could run all the leagues at the same time (what off course was the first thing I did... and stopped very fast as it took ages to play). Unfortunately the game was very slow and had some bugs in the beginning, but the problems got solved with some patches SI released the following months, making the game to the best what ever has been on the market. The people acknowledged that work, and made CM3 becoming the fastest selling PC game in the UK, breaking all records.

Only some months after CM3 the next Champman got released. Known under the name CM99/00, the game entered the market on december 3rd or 10th in the most countries. In germany the release-dates of the game became a running gag, as the only shop that sold it (imported from england) delayed it again and again. Compared to CM3 the changes weren't very big, but anyway it contained some interesting new features. Additionally to the 15 countries in CM3, you now also had the opportunity to control a team in the american "Major Soccer League"

In the late 2000 CM99/00 found it's successor in CM00/01. This game now was available in 9 different languages, and after CM2, the long awaited return to the german market under the name "Der Meistertrainer", with Bayern Munich's coach Ottmar Hitzfeld smiling from the cover. However, most of the german gaming magazines rated the game very bad - mainly because of the missing 3D-animations. A very easy, but also one of the most interesting new features was the "live league table" on match day, which allows you to plot how your clubs position in the table changes as the goals fly in.

Another very interesting about CM00/01 was, that you now had the opportunity to choose your team from one of 26(!) countries. All in all, you now had the choice of starting a managing career in argentina, australia, belgium, brazil, croatia, denmark, england, finland, france, germany, greece, holland, ireland, italy, japan, northern ireland, norway, poland, portugal, russia, scotland, spain, sweden, turkey, usa and even wales. Those new features made CM00/01 the best & also most succesful part of the Championship Manager series so far.


Some of the information above I took from the Sports Interactive Page.