Oct 3, 2013 - 'I probably had a week off work at the time [of its original release], and since then. That may be the straw that eventually breaks CM01/02's back. 'Others wished to emulate the original database style used by developers. Did CM 01/02 have an editor in it? I'm thinking of buying it again but wondered if it had an editable database like the new games have, so that you could update.

As the football world is consumed by a new Premier League season, and while football management fans salivate over the trickle of new feature announcements for the next instalment of Football Manager, some are happier sticking with a relic of virtual football's yesteryear. For one group of Championship Manager fans, the celebrated series never advanced beyond its Season 01/02 edition. Sports Interactive never left publisher Eidos for greener pastures at Sega, Championship Manager never became Football Manager, and there was never even a 2D match engine - let alone the fancy 3D one introduced in FM 2009 - to augment the game's iconic text commentary. Champ Man 01/02 is frozen in time, a shrine to an approach to football management games that since went the way of the dodo - where realism takes a backseat to simplicity and fun. But it's also one of the most up-to-date and well-supported football titles around today. How can this be?

And why would anyone want to play a 12-year-old interactive spreadsheet? The story starts in 2003, when a contingent of forum regulars on leading fansite gave up on Championship Manager 4 and its new 2D match engine. It was too complicated, they felt, and it was slow and buggy and not at all like the game they loved.

This section needs additional citations for. Osmotr anesteziologa blank. To help compare different, this section lists starting at 10 6 ( or 1,000 ). Top row: (left), (right); bottom row: (left), (center), and (right), to scale.

So they went back to the previous season's edition. This is how we watched matches in the olden times. 'After a while, I realised that the game was so popular that it needed a bigger place than a sub-forum on The Dugout,' Mark Henderson recalls.

He created a free phpBB forum on the 6th of October, 2005, which grew progressively larger as more Champ Man fans stumbled upon it or migrated from other communities. Forum-goers like Canadian Craig Forrest, who discovered the game through a Colombian friend in college then went online in search for help with tactics and transfers. He started at a site called Project Championship Manager, delighting in the banter and discoveries that people shared, then found Henderson and co's Champ Man community via Google.

Many regulars share similar stories, with a few around from the very beginning. Scooterfan remembers the early days on The Dugout when one guy, Alex Sawczuk, produced twice yearly data updates, allowing players to keep up with the latest transfers. 'It got to a point where he didn't have the time to produce them anymore,' he says, 'and different people took up the mantle without much success.' From this spawned the idea of a separate forum with a group of people working together to continue the data updates, only more comprehensively - they wanted to cover each continent, every league, so as to 'keep everyone happy.' Not everyone ended up being happy.

After more than four years of ever-increasing size and popularity, a schism formed in the Update Team. 'Some of the members began to have differences in terms of assigning attributes and values to the players in the database,' Henderson says. 'Some agreed, some didn't.' So they split in two, with the disruptors known as the SIM team - on account of their focus on stringent accuracy - and the other team called ODB - representing the 'original database' style used by developers Sports Interactive.