Ten years after the dawn of the football management game, the Personal Computer was weasling its way into peoples' homes, and Microsoft started to exert a muscular grip on the software market. Gremlin Graphics released Premier Manager II, a simulation that redefined the genre, or at least sketched out its rough draft.

PM2 wasn't the software house's first excursion into management games. I still remember having Footballer of the Year for the Spectrum, a hoary classic in which you took on the unique role of being a player, albeit one with managerial powers. In fact, the only time you got to show your silky ball skills was when it was time to take a penalty (useless advice now, but if you planted the ball in the right corner you couldn't fail to score, a tactic that England's penalty takers might do well to learn). Considering the Speccy's limitations, it wasn't a total loss, but it was very easy. The game lived or died on the lottery option, where - if you kept on buying tickets - you would always draw a £500k jackpot sooner or later. The rest was cheaply earned glory and riches.

I never played PM1, but by all accounts the sequel was a tweaked improvement. Even the box had some magic about it, with its photo of someone's - clearly meant to be Sir Alex's - head in mid-bark at a changing room of red-shirted heroes. The game came on a single floppy disk with a sardonically written instruction manual and little clue that years of helpless addiction were contained therein.

At the start, you could choose to manage any team you liked, as long as it was in the Conference. I was always Macclesfield, attempting to emulate - and better - the exploits of Sammy McIlroy, or sometimes Gateshead, who played at the finely equipped International Stadium that didn't need too many improvements over the years. The easy option was newly relegated Scunthorpe, whilst the toughies included Forest Green, a side so excellently named that it ought to have played its matches in Scotland. Your squad's names loosely tallied with real-life personnel, and you only ever got to see your players' surnames, giving the experience a sort of old Etonian flavour (or not). Having said that, you were able to change their names, and there were times, bad times, when I methodically altered mine to resemble Boro stars of the day (Paul Wikinson!).

Your screen was taken up with a set of icons, each of which led to some facet or other. First, there was the office, which showed how popular you were, both with the Board (keep the balance healthy) and supporters (they like results, you see) and gave you a percentage score based on your progress. There was also a picture here of the club secretary, a Kirsty Gallacher lookalike with big tits whose facial expression mirrored your current situation. She scowled if you were on a losing streak, and looked ready to offer oral relief if you'd hit the Premiership heights. Fantastic stuff.

In the squad page, you could decide your XI for the upcoming match and decide formation and tactics. The latter element you only had to visit once if you got it right at the start. My favourite was the 4-3-3, with short passing and a counter-attacking philosophy (because even then, Fergie's style of play was the one to emulate). Each player had a different set of statistics, a mark out of 99 for tackling, passing and so forth, with a degree of complexity that made Football Manager look like one plus one is two, but gave Championship Manager the qualities of quantum physics. Hidden attributes were viewed as unfair, so what you saw really was what you got, and if this wasn't simple enough, each player had an overall rating. These ranged from Fair (with a star scale of one to five), on to Good and then Very Good, through to the very best, known as Exceptional. Alan Shearer would have been the latter, and the Premiership was cluttered with these behemoths, whereas your starting side was largely 'fair' with the odd 'good' player lumped in.

The transfer screen had far more about it than Football Manager's rather limited options, but only ever offered you a selection of listed players. There wasn't an option to make an approach for someone not on this list, but you hardly needed it with a reasonable spread to choose from. Again, things were made straightforward, as there were always some free players thrown in for good measure. Was this an echo of the Bosman-dominated era to come, or just cop outery? Either way, you could recruit a decent army with unreasonable speed to blast its way out of the Conference and beyond, which led to armchair fans everywhere wondering why everyone just didn't do this in reality. As though they could…

Onto match day, and a black screen that flashed up relevant information when it happened. A sort of spirit level was in the centre, within which a football quivered in the direction of whoever was dominant at the present moment. Whenever someone was taking a shot, everything would stop, and an animation depicted the ball heading towards goal. If the goalkeeper saved or the ball went wide, the action settled back down, but when it went in a joyous 'GOAL!' flashed up.

You could set this up to work at varying speeds, and as in CM I used to crank it up to the fastest setting possible. Why, after all, eke out the tension? Typically, if you'd sorted this game out, the score you'd end up with would be a crushing 4-1 win, with all your goals coming in the first 20 minutes. Strangely, I never grew tired of this, or was it just me who was strange?

It was actually a fairly straightforward exercise to romp through the English league structure (sometimes achieving promotion in successive seasons) and come to rule the Premiership. Indeed I used to see the Silkmen win European honours year after year, along with claiming everything the domestic scene had to offer. It was possible to go through the regular season without losing a match, so that ultimately any campaign that saw our boys finish with a points haul under 110 was viewed as a disappointment. But this wasn't all that PM2 had to offer.

Back then, managers had a workload that fitted the definition. Alongside all the team duties was a mandate to maintain financial buoyancy, and unlike in Football Manager, this involved more than just taking out bank loans with all the carelessness of an undergraduate planning a night out. There wasn't all that much more to it, though. The main duty was to oversee which advertising boards were to be used, and here Gremlin offered a tip for budding economists - always choose the advertisers who paid the most. Hey, thanks for that. The boards themselves generally plugged other Gremlin products, which was a nice touch of in-product marketing from the boys. Jurassic Park, eat your heart out. You also had to take charge of stadium development, building up the Moss Rose's substandard ground into something worthy of the football league (this never seems to include Hartlepool in reality, mind) through beefing up the facilities, adding a roof, and so forth. The obvious knock-on effect of your improvements was seen in attendance growth, which you could raise further by adding block after block of new stands, eventually transforming your lowly home into the Nou Camp.

So there was something for everyone, from the prudent Lennie Lawrence types through to shrewd, Wenger-esque tacticians. In truth, Premier Manager II was never much cop. It was far too easy, just like Footballer of the Year before it in fact, and plopped the route to glory in your lap in a way that CM never does. At least in the latter, you have to work for your success; there is a cogent sense of achievement when you get your Conference side to the pinnacle. Gremlin's pioneering game had something about it though, and later simulations have adopted many of the elements it contained. The following year, Premier Manager 3 was released, and let you do things like watch a match in action (don't get excited; this involved ill-shaped pegs shuffling around a pitch) and listen to a pathetic, looping tune that ended up sending many gamers into murderous rages. I hated it.