The Manager
1991 computer games Amiga games
German soccer manager game that was later adapted for English users. While far from being perfect The Manager offered original and interesting way of presenting the match events.
The soccer manager games of the 1990s were quite similar to each other, it was hard to make a game that would stand out among the competitors, but The Manager, even despite being a German production, made it to the foreign markets and was later adapted to English league. What was the secret of its success? Certainly not in-depth analysis of the matches, because the players were described only by 3 parameters (usual in German games): skill, fitness and form. Only the basic statistics of the player were available and only from current season, which did not help with planning the whole strategy.
But The Manager had one element that was made so clever that you simply forgot about the rest - it was the match engine and animations that presented the goal attempts. While other games had similar solution for the match events in The Manager the animations were complicated and had several different endings. For example in some blue team is about to take a shot, but situation changes and it is the red team that scores after a counter-attack. They were setting up the whole atmosphere of the game and were the element that made The Manager a classic.
Game also had some interesting managerial options, like improvement of the stadium, training camps, sponsorship deal, but overall it was rather simple game that was put on the pedestal by the match events animations.
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