Publisher: 3DO Europe
Developer: Anco Software Ltd.
Website: ANCO
It would probably be difficult to find a genre as dominated by one game as football management sims are dominated by the Championship Manager series. Almost every other genre known to gamers has at least two titles vying for supremacy, with devotees on each side engaging in heated arguments about which game is truly superior. Footy sims, on the other hand, have the king on one side and a ragged bunch of pretenders on the other. Even fans of other sims seem to implicitly acknowledge that while they may prefer Premier Manager or Ultimate Soccer Manager or something else, CM is still the “better” game.
Or at least the better simulation. For if one word were to try and describe the game, that would have to be it. No other game purports to model the whole of football in the comprehensive manner of the CM series. Previous challengers seem to have tried to do it all, and ended up falling short everywhere. Player Manager 2000, on the other hand, concentrates its efforts and in certain areas it works a treat.
PM2K boasts that it was “developed using the real life professional experience of top managers,” who happen to be Martin O’Neill, Bobby Robson, John Gregory, Jim Smith, Harry Redknapp, Gordon Strachan, Paul Bracewell, and Graham Taylor. There’s an amusing set of pictures on the official website which shows each of these managers “playing” the game. In every picture save one, each manager has contrived to make it appear he is actually playing or at least checking out the game himself. The exception is Bobby Robson, who is being shown the game by an employee of Anco Software Ltd. That’s ok, Bobby - it’s better than what Ruud would have done.
