In early 1994 Oliver started work on the new Championship Manager. The basic concept was to improve on the original in every way - basically to make the original look rubbish in comparison.
Paul was busy with other commitments and so Oliver pressed ahead alone with Paul helping out in an advisory capacity. In this time the company “Sports Interactive Ltd” was formed. This was Olivers second company name, the first being Intelek which originally were based in Bournemouth. The new company base was a spare room in the house in London where Oliver was living at that time. Oliver continued developing the game for the next twelve months.
Mark Woodger began the task of organising the research into the teams and players and organised the project to contact fanzine writers and fans of particular clubs through the web to enlist their help in the rating of the players they saw regularly.
The first testing of an early beta version of Championship Manager 2 was a very strange experience and far from what we know as Championship Manager 2 today. Playing a match consisted of being able to pick a team and tactics as normal but during the match there were no match descriptions and the only tactical change including subs could be made at half time. This basically meant if you were losing change a couple of players and hope for the best. However, its addictiveness was clear even at that early stage.
Development continued through the summer of ‘95 and after a couple of delays the game was released in September of that year. It was an instant success and remained in the top twenty selling games for the next year. Soon after the release of Championship Manager 2, a few websites dedicated to the game started to spring up. So Oliver said “We should have one of those”. Mark who hadn’t got a clue about website design said “OK - I’ll give it a go”. A month or so later in November ‘95, the first (albeit very basic) website from the “Creators and Writers of Championship Manager 2” was launched.
Paul began to devote more time to Championship Manager 2 96/97 and the famous patch which was released April ‘96 and went a long way to sorting out the problems associated with the original Championship Manager 2. Championship Manager 2 96/97 was released October ‘96 and again was well received.
Paul and Mark started work on Championship Manager 97/98 in early 1997. One of the greatest quotes ever came from this “Oh - this’ll be easy - it’ll only take a couple of weeks”, said Paul, the eternal optimist. It took a solid ten months to get it together and released - and that was just the English language version. The Championship Manager 2 engine was brought to its outer limits as nine leagues were combined with the possibility of running three simultaneously - almost every part of the game needed to be modified and many improvements were made. A database of some 20000 players and 2500 teams was put together with researchers helping out from all corners of the globe.
This final version of Championship Manager 2, released 31st October 1997 at an update price, went straight to number one of the all formats chart and remained in the top 20 for many many months.
In the meantime, Oliver, who had taken a well earned rest after 18 months solid work on Championship Manager 2, started to conceive the first ideas for Championship Manager 3. The game would once again be totally re-written.
In March 1997, Oliver and new staff member Marc Vaughan launched themselves into the Championship Manager 3 project.
After a lengthy three months of interviewing, the right people were found to work on Championship Manager 3.
With the team assembled, work on Championship Manager 3 steamed ahead and all involved worked hard to make it into a great game. The game was (finally) released on March 26th 1999 and made history as it was the fastest selling PC Game in the UK of all time shifting over 55,000 units in its first.
Championship Manager 3 continued to sell well staying at the top spot of the all formats for 3 weeks and has been top of the PC charts for 11 weeks in total since release. Three foreign language versions of Championship Manager 3 were released in May 1999. The languages included were Italian, French and Portuguese and has proved popular in all these countries as well as all the other countries where it has been distributed.
Due to various problems that a minority of Championship Manager 3 users experienced, the team at Sports Interactive worked hard on solving them and also enhanced and improved many areas of the game. This has resulted in the release of a number of free updates so that Championship Manager 3 could be enjoyed by everyone.
What is expected to be the final update of the original Championship Manager 3 has just been released and includes many enhancements and improvements. This is known as version 3.04e and has incorporated a lot of the suggestions given to us by many Championship Manager 3 users around the world. Version 3.04e now allows you to play the game in three new languages - these are Spanish, Norwegian and Swedish.
A completely new re-written version of Championship Manager has just been released titled “Championship Manager 4” after an almost year long wait and 4 expansion packs later the game is now running quite well without as many bugs as in the original release. Many fans of the game though see it as a failure after months of wait and 4 delays later the game came out full of bugs even after almost 5 months of testing by over 100 people! SI Games have worked hard to correct these bugs providing expansion packs which fix the bugs released on the website and in the Championship Manager magazines which are released every few months.
Overall Paul & Oliver Collyer created a very addictive life like football management game which many people find enjoyment out of and I bet they never thought 20 Years ago when starting work on the first version of what is now known as Championship Manager would ever prove to be this successful and end up producing over 10 different versions of the game.
