Let me take your hand, as we go on a bumpy ride back through the anals to the early 1980s. Margaret Thatcher's Tory Party was on the crest of a Falklands-inspired second term in government. Michael Jackson was the biggest recording artiste on the planet (and still black, folks!). The most essential programme on TV was undoubtedly Grange Hill, closely followed by Dallas. And entertainment for a new generation of bored kids was to be found in a small black box with rubber keys called the Spectrum 48k Home Computer.

We might laugh at the Speccy now - at its godawful colour clashes, the C90 tapes crammed with pirated games and the four-minute loading time for software that was accompanied by hideous harpy-screeches (for starters) - but back then, there was no alternative. Nearly everyone had one. The posh kids later owned the Commodore 64, which was a better all-rounder, but had a tape machine that broke after six weeks, guaranteed. For us though, Sir Clive Sinclair's invention was a tiny revolution in gaming.

One of the earliest successes on the machine (and its predecessor, the puny ZX81) was Football Manager, written in BASIC, for Juninho's sake, and yours for £6.95. There was something intoxicating about the advertising, with its claim that over a million copies of the game had been sold, alongside a photo of smug-looking, tubby programmer, Kevin Toms (look! There he is! Looking pleased with himself! Observe the digital watch with loadsa buttons and scruffy goatee for authenticity…). In order to distribute his baby, Toms had to form his own company, Addictive Games, a name that had a definite portentous note about it. Football Manager was designed for keyboard use, which was good because your Kempton joystick (a word carrying all sorts of connotations for a 13-year old) was invariably buggered from pummelling Daley Thompson's Decathlon.

You started by selecting your team; no matter who you were you began life as a Fourth Division outfit (we use old money here, pet; the Premiership's still a glint in the eye of one or two self-serving businessmen). It was then your job to work your way through the divisions, buying and selling as necessary, until you were league champions. Fantastic concept; I'm surprised it hasn't caught on.

Now, let's remember for a moment that this is a very old game, and as such, it is fairly rubbish. No, we have to replace the word 'rubbish' with 'utter bobbins'. A year or two ago, in a fit of nostalgia I downloaded a Spectrum emulator and a copy of FM from t'Internet (the game loaded dismissively instantly without any of the ungodly shrieking for that true to life experience). It was then, knowing that Championship Manager was waiting at home, that I tried my hand at the subtleties of the oldie, a game I hadn't been anywhere near for nigh on 15 years. I soon found out why.

Your division is a hotbed of 15 teams (why? I don't know? What happened to the others? Not a clue) and you play each of them once. You also have cup matches, and regardless of the level you are at, you will always start in the first round. Next, a look at your side, made up of various household names (Keegan, Regis, Hoddle, Sansom (?)) and with two essential attributes - fitness and skill. Obviously, you want your side to be as rich as possible in both categories, so it's on to the transfer market. A hive of frantic activity, this. Each week, one player is listed as available. If you like him, you make your offer, and if the club accepts, that's it. He's yours. If you like him but haven't got the money to hand, why your friendly bank manager is always ready to dish out a whopping loan to underwrite the deal. These really were more innocent times, weren't they? Eventually, after much of this, you can sort out your formation (don't make me laugh, you just had to stick an extra attacker on if you wanted to), compare your stats with those of the opposition, make further changes, and off we go! Into the 3D match engine! Yes! Here we go, this is it!

On the advertising (to be found within the pages of legendary magazine, Crash), the in-match graphics were seen as a big selling point for FM, but they lied to us. Maybe a pair of glasses - one lens red, the other blue - that was supplied with the package was missing from mine, only it was about as three-dimensional as a Christian Gross team talk. What you got for your money was a green screen, green as in grass (right, kids?), then the program painstakingly drew in the white lines for goalmouth, penalty area, etc, as though the groundsman did this himself just before each fixture.

Then the fun really began, as the players - tiny stick men, one team in black strip, one in white - were shown taking shots at goal. These figures had a slow, lumbering quality about them, as if modelled on Hamilton Ricard, but despite this never failed to fox the defence. Occasionally, a defender would slide, precursing moonwalking, across the screen to block a shot, sending the ball - a dot - out of play. Usually though, if that pixel was on target, it was going in, and you just had to pray that it was your side on the advance. A psychedelic combination of red crosses and blue text ensued, signalling a goal in much the same way as Brazilian commentators describe them, adding to the intensity. Oh and by the way, goals were never credited to an individual, merely added to the team's tally. This suggested either (i) Toms was a committed socialist, who saw goals as benefiting the collective above individuals, or (ii) he hadn't written this facet into the code.

So the match ended - whatever happened next? Well, the game thought about it for a while, typically half a minute, before displaying the results from your division, line-by-line, videprinter fashion. Then it worked out the league table; cue further deep thought, and an agonising wait before it reached your club. Then there was another opportunity to peruse the transfer market, before going on to the next fixture. Superb. At the end of the season, the program went through an almighty bout of consideration before going on to the next one.

Fatally, it reset your players' attributes. Let's say that Keegan was your star player. The following year he could be turned into a klutz of Gus Caesar proportions. This came across as very unfair, but such is life. Eventually, it was easily possible to climb the tables, and not overtly tough to clinch the league title year after year. FA Cups fell into your lap just as simplistically, and it was even possible to win the competition whilst your side languished in Division Four. Truly, a world where footballing parity had been achieved, no?

I might have made FM out to be rubbish, and of course it was, but it was horribly compulsive. There were no real issues over finances, training, tactics, battles with the Board, defending/rubbishing players, reserve teams, and, oh all the things that CM makes you worry about, but here was the germ of the game that we would all be playing today. It is possible that without FM, there would not be a CM, such was its impact to the legions of Spectrum gamers. Toms, with his million copies sold and his almost naïve stumbling across a goldmine, proved that management simulations had a place in the bloated Speccy market, and it is still a game I remember with some fondness. If this weren't the case, I'd still be hammering away at Daley Thompson in the 100m, wouldn't I?

Incidentally, Toms's latest project, an attempt to introduce yet another Internet management game, appears to have stalled. Proof, if you will, that you get one chance at making it and then…