Memories of my A-level exams bring back memories of Championship Manager. How can what is essentially an interactive spreadsheet create such theatre? Have such memories? Be so brilliant?
Right now I (as most teachers are across our fair and pleasant land) am focussed on the defining point of the young people I manage - their exams. It is a time that requires skills similar to that of a swotting student: perseverance, planning and plenty of pizza.
However, my GCSEs were not taken at the time of the most recent (and well-designed) Football Manager franchise, but rather of the original quality spreadsheet gaming that was the glorious Championship Manager 1993. Like many things of the time, it was not polished; it must have taken between two and three hours to load a season (something that would fairly often crash.) In addition, I would only manage something nearing 8 seasons before the complexity of the data would result in hideous corruptions of the league data (such as Liverpool securing the services of a player with maximum stats, for example.) Despite these misgivings (of which a TeacherGamer would simply expect back in the day) I still managed to play through at least two full campaigns in the epic stretch of free-time between my exams and the next stage of my educational career.
Despite its age, the game held many facets of gameplay universal across all the versions. Well, save for the fact that I would always sub a player after 20 minutes and find their replacement was better. Curiously, the subbed player would never be unduly affected by what would have undoubtedly been an embarrassing experience.
The best experiences, though, involving purchasing players before they were stars, watching them develop, and then selling them just as they passed their peak. Many PC games involve this concept - get bigger numbers than anyone else. The theatre of it plays out in your imagination. The players didn’t have the dozens of stats they do these days; they had five. And it didn’t even give a finishing stat. However, value did dictate which were the good players, and it was fixed to age. Purchase a player under 21 who was a million pounds or more and he would be a star. Conversely, if a player hit 29, they would strangely dip in form (or by a few other circumstances that my distant memory can’t quite currently muster.) Suffice to say, I remember selling a utility midfielder for £7 million (which made him one of the most expensive players in the game) and revelled in checking on his hideous sub-7 (out of 10) performances. Another player who I still remember was a generated player who had maximum stats for all but one of his statistics, but was only ever worth half a million throughout his entire career. He occasionally had decent games as a sub, but he was more of a progedy that never quite developed (my Joe Cole, perhaps.)
Unlike my current experience as a TeacherGamer (where I only give myself time enough to manage teams in the top-flight of the Premiership), I would start with Wolves in the bottom league of a regenerated player list. I would promote them in successive seasons, and win the Premiership after either one, or two, years constantly. I wouldn’t always win the cups (as even then I couldn’t see the point of resetting a lost game or an inconvenient injury.) While I felt that winning six league titles in a row was somewhat unrealistic, I would always lose a league game or three. Watching Barcelona this season (2011) and Arsenal’s invincible season in the early 2000s though made me realise that my league wasn’t too far off the realms of reality.
What was a great touch for such an early management game was that the playing style of your team evolved as your team progressed. Although you only had options for five playing styles or so (long ball, direct, short passing, mixed, and continental) you would find that only ‘direct’ would enable your team to win promotion strongly.
To win the European Cup (which was still in a purely knockout form save for a final one-game league) required a continental style. And that required at least a season of transition as your selected this style. Even with this transition, to win the European Cup was an incredible hard feat I achieved only once. The game had a perculiar way of making your best players transfer to foreign teams, thereby making them unsignable for a few seasons. When they returned, they were never the same player. Too many pizzas, perhaps?
Like with all truly difficult (yet achievable) feats in gaming history, winning the European Cup was theatre that I will never forget. Paul Simpson was my decent £5m left winger. He was the best winger available to me, but not my best player. Normally I simply failed to score against European opposition; he scored the winning goal in the last ten minutes of the final. The game itself only presented text when a team scored. I often thought that the difficulty of scoring a goal was was reflected in the tone of the text: I remember even now the text saying: Simpson has scored one of the best goals you’ll ever see!
As an English teacher I appreciate a life in books and imagination. Seeing that text in the theatre I had created in the space either side of my GCSEs and A-Levels is something that has motivated me to share even now, over a decade later. The game itself is utterly indicative of that time in my life, and of my exams. While I don’t think that I would play it again (I’d rather try to immerse myself in the current FM) it is a piece of gaming history that I welcome as I would an old, if rather difficult, friend.
22:15
A teacher
