Tell us about the new features for 00/01.
MILES: Squillions. Ten new leagues - Turkey, Greece, Russia, Ireland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Finalnd, Australia, Poland and Croatia. It's been translated into more languages as well. We ran a poll on the website to find out what leagues people wanted to see in the game and those were the top ten that came up. The next ten we'll hopefully feature at some point in the future and beyond that I don't think there are going to be any leagues left for us to do.
There's loads more players in the database, about another 12,000, and little features like a live league table. At any point while you're playing a game you can see how your result and how all the other results affect the league as they stand. There's loads and loads of media stuff which adds a whole new feel to the game because the players now all have personalities and the personalities are a really important part of the game - how they react and how other players react to them through stories in the press. If a player has been dropped and he's unhappy with the fact he's been dropped and he's got a stroppy personaility he's likely to go to one of the newspapers that appear in the game, which include The Guardian, The Express and the The Sun. We've done deals with lots of different newspapers and lots of different football websites. He might go to one of those papers and say "I'm unhappy that I've been dropped, I hate the manager". Then there's loads of infighting and then, as the manager, you get the chance to respond to those newspaper reports, either agreeing, disagreeing or not commenting and that can effect the whole squad's morale. You can cause a mutiny if you handle the press badly.

Do Eidos have, or try to have, any input, and what sort of things do they suggest?
PAUL: Eidos purely market and produce the game. They're very good, they let us get on with it and do it our way. We don't have any interference.


There are rumours and hearsay that Microsoft are planning to phase out the PC as a games machine to make way for the Xbox. Do you subscribe to that, and what does it mean for Championship Manager?
PAUL: Firstly, the Xbox will support Championship Manager, and we're hopeful of doing an Xbox version. If that happened it wouldn't necessarily be a big problem for us, but I'm not sure how they can phase out the PC as a games machine. There are a lot of parts made for PCs that aren't made by Microsoft that make games run so I'm not sure how that would work.
How quickly has Sports Interactive grown?
MILES: Three years ago we had a small office in Highbury with three of us. Now we have a new office and there are nine of us plus part time. So it's fairly quick but we don't want it to get much bigger than it is because Oliver and I want to keep control over the game. We want to be hands on and we want to be programming and if you have too many people it becomes impossible. We don't need too many people to write it.

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