Championship Manager 93/Gameplay

The first thing to do is boot up your Amiga, Atari ST or PC and load Championship Manager 93. You will initially be met by the copy protection screen which asks you to enter the score of a match from the game's instruction manual.

If you are playing a cracked or emulated version of the game, chances are this has been bypassed and you can just enter any score to get through. If you are a good law-abiding citizen you're using an original copy then it's time to dig out the manual. Or better yet, see the copy protection codes page for a full table of all the "results."

Once you're past the copy protection you get to the startup menu. Here you can click on Help if you want some info about what to do, or you can choose one of the useful options, which are explained below:

New Game
This starts a brand new game of Championship Manager (which can take a very long time if you are playing on an Amiga or Atari ST). After selecting this option you get to choose whether you want the printer on, then whether you want to use "1993" player names or "generated" player names (where the computer makes up fictional players).

Next you have to choose how many people will be playing (between one and four players), then each player (manager) picks which team they want to manage. If you are playing with generated players you can select any of the huge number teams shown on the list. But if you are using the 1993 players option you can only select one of the teams in the football league. See the playable teams page for a full list of teams you can select.

After selecting a team to manage you have to choose a personality for yourself. You can choose whichever one matches your real personality but beware: if you select "rash" or "arrogant" your players are more likely to dislike you and become unhappy. "Confident", "thoughtful" and "responsible" are always pretty safe choices to go for. Finally, enter your first name and last name. When these steps have been completed by all player the game creation process will begin.

If you are playing on an Amiga or Atari ST, you should probably go make a cup coffee and put your feet up for a while because the process is painfully slow. It usually takes around half an hour on a standard Amiga 500. Alternatively, if you're playing on a PC made in the past 10 years the new game only takes a few seconds to create.

Continue Season
Select this option if you want to resume a saved game. It only takes a few seconds to load as opposed to 30+ minutes when starting from scratch.

Quick Start
The developers apparently realised that starting a new game can take forever, so they have provided a quick start option. It is essentially a saved game that starts in Week 1 - the only problem is that you have to play as Manchester United. If you want to play as another team you can always quit Man United and add another manager, then pick any club you want.

This option is only recommended if you really can't wait around for a new game to load.

Now it's on to some of the basics of playing the game...