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How do you cope with all the changes in the transfer system, bearing in mind it was one way two years ago, it's another way now and in a few months it could be completely different again?
PAUL: The Bosman thing wasn't that difficult to introduce into the game. If transfer fees are abolished, which I don't think they will be, it'll be about a year. If everyone has to have a buy-out clause - which I think's a good solution - that's easy for us because we already have them in there.
MILES: Your general armchair football fan doesn't actually realise how many rules are introduced and changed each year and we've always been pretty good at keeping on top of all of those. We tend to release an update of the game every year and some people might think it's just data changes but there are a hell of a lot of changes that go into one of these updates. It really does take a full year.
How does that compare with EA's Football Manager 2001, EA being notorious for banging out marginal updates year after year?
MILES: EA's game is not just an update. They've changed the whole graphics engine, they've changed loads of stuff in the game. It's a hell of a lot better than it was last year. Yes, they have got some inaccuracies but we don't really look. I played the EA game because I'm a huge football management fan and therefore I buy every single one that comes out.
PAUL: Judas!
MILES: Call me a Judas, whatever, I always go back to Champ Man because for me it's the best, it's the most accurate. We also know there's been at least one football management game in the last twelve months that took our code and backwardly engineered it and completely ****ed it up. That's the good thing about having unorthodox programmers which I think we've got here - the code is quite difficult to hack into.
PAUL: Without going into too much detail, it's a certain way as a result of starting writing it in 1985 when Oliver and I were teenagers so it's kind of evolved into its own strange shape. Having been doing it for 15 years, it's very difficult for Gremlin or EA or whoever to get a team together to write something equal to it in one year.
There were many gameplay improvements and new features in the 99/00 edition, as well as assorted patches, and now there's the new version. Do you think it's now going to continue to grow organically, or will there be a full-blown CM4?
MILES: Yeah, CM4 is planned and, in a perfect world, will be released in 2002 - but that is in a perfect world. There's loads of extra stuff that we all want to see in the game, including huge online capacity.
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