Cliff Notes – The 80s Sinclair Spectrum version of Football Manager is being remade on Steam
- The original Football Manager, created by Kevin Toms in 1982, is being revived on Steam by Curveball Games, filling the gap left by Sega’s delayed Football Manager 26.
- The game launches on August 14, coinciding with the start of the Premier League season, and will feature a mix of real player names from both past and present.
- While the graphics may appear basic, the management mechanics are designed to be as complex as modern iterations, appealing to both nostalgic fans and new players.
The 80s Sinclair Spectrum version of Football Manager is being remade on Steam
This should keep you occupied until Football Manager 26 comes out (Curveball Games)
With no new Football Manager from Sega in over a year, the creator of the original game from the 80s is reviving it on Steam.
After several delays, it wasn’t too surprising to hear Sega had cancelled Football Manager 25. But this does mean fans are having to go an unusually long time without a new instalment, with still no guarantee of when the next game will be out.
Developer Sports Interactive has insisted it’s working on another Football Manager game, but there’s no word on whether it’ll be called Football Manager 26 or if it’ll even be out this year.
In the meantime, there is an alternative: a re-release of the original Football Manager. Not the 2005 game that kicked off Sega’s series, but the 1982 original that was first released on the obscure Video Genie home computer and then various other formats of the 8-bit era.
Football Manager was originally created by Kevin Toms (whose face always appeared on the box cover) and found great success on the ZX Spectrum, although versions of it were ported to almost every home computer format of the 8-bit and 16-bit era, including the PC.
Despite being entirely text only it was a huge commercial success, although the last entry, in 1992, was made without Toms’ involvement and the series faded from memory.
It was revived in 2005 by developer Sports Interactive, and publisher Sega, as a means of continuing the Championship Manager series – which had always been a spiritual successor to Football Manager – by another name, although Toms was never involved in the making of the games.
Expert, exclusive gaming analysis
Toms returned to the genre in 2016, with mobile game Football Star Manager, and now he’s teamed up with publisher Curveball Games to bring the game to PC.
You won’t need to wait long to play it either since it launches in just a couple of weeks on August 14, the same day as the start of the Premier League season.
You can find its Steam page here and while there’s no mention of pricing at the time of writing, it presumably won’t be particularly expensive since the mobile versions on the Apple and Google Play stores only cost £4.99.
The announcement trailer cheekily refers to the game as ‘the original, the best, and the only Football Star Manager of the year’ and jokes that it has ‘none of the features you’ve come to expect from modern gaming.’
Rather than being literally the same game though, Football Star Manager is merely reminiscent of the original game and is not exactly the same in terms of graphics or interface – somewhere between a remaster and a remake.
Much like Sega’s games, Football Star Manager features real player names and teams, although they seem to be a mixture of old and new, with teams featuring both Glen Hoddle and Alexandre Lacazette.
While Football Star Manager has already been around for nearly 10 years, it’ll be interesting to see how it performs on Steam, since many younger fans will be unaware that the series goes all the way back to the dawn of home computing.
Nevertheless, with Sega’s next entry MIA, this is an open goal for Football Star Manager to capitalise on until Football Manager 26, or heaven forbid Football Manager 27, finally appears.
Its graphics may look basic, but the actual management part promises to be as complex as the modern games (Curveball Games)
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