[I recently discovered that I missed out a large number of #1 games from earlier in the ’90s, and with help I’m working through one a week. Please get in touch if you are interested in writing about any of them!]
Between 2005 and 2017, every time Manchester United played a match in the FA Cup, TV companies chose to show it, despite some wide fields of often more exciting alternatives. No other club has that kind of record, because no other club offered such a reliably high number of viewers. And the mass following of Manchester United went back well before that, before their years of biggest success. That helped Krysalis’s computer game Manchester United Europe to sell well enough to be the UK’s #1 game on its release in 1991. It also had some great timing with Man U’s European breakthrough, and there’s a slight return for that concept in Manchester United Premier League Champions. They had finally won the league and were about to do so again, so there is a hook there, if a less obvious one.
Manchester United PLC (as well as Premier League champions, they were indeed a Public Limited Company, since 1991), has little to do with Manchester United specifically beyond some logos and branding. You can play as any team in the football league just as easily with just as much detail. That’s not the point though. In the Manchester United name, Krysalis had a franchise with reach, including outside of games, and that gave them a lot of options. It gave them a freedom like that which allowed two Batman games made by different people in different styles to do well in 1986 and 1989, or indeed allowed Barbarian II to change completely from Barbarian since the gameplay wasn’t the appeal anyway. Krysalis took full advantage to drop the style of the previous games and opt for something new. New for them, at least. Not new new, because their approach was to brazenly copy Sensible Soccer.
I couldn’t help but laugh on first reaching a match in Manchester United PLC, because the similarity of the look is so blatant. The pitch’s horizontal bands of alternating colours with a speckling of pixels look the same as Sensible Soccer’s. The camera angle is the same, rendering the players the same size. The players fan out onto the pitch in the same way. They move in the same way, really really fast, throwing themselves theatrically at headers and making sitting sliding tackles. The goalkeepers have the same sense of being flung from a catapult each time they make a dive. And the point which most hammers home how much Krysalis were taking the piss is that the player you are controlling is highlighted by displaying their squad number above their head in white, in precisely the same way as in Sensible Soccer.
Manchester United PLC has a couple of new moves of its own. When the ball is at a height in between the header and slide, players do a kind of jumping scissor kick volley, which looks impressive if nothing else. It has a very smart tactics customiser which makes it simple to set up your players how you like, although its wider attempts at management elements are rather lacking, with no transfers. The ball doesn’t move in quite the same way as in Sensible Soccer, being slightly less predictable, including sticking a little to players’ feet except when it randomly doesn’t. The whole thing works, but feels ever so slightly off. I found a ridiculously high proportion of my goals coming from penalties and rebounds from penalties. Even when I had fun, I was always aware of it being knock-off fun. It didn’t need to be the best, though. It’s Manchester United.
