{"id":3539,"date":"2024-07-30T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-30T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldclassservers.net\/blog\/2024\/07\/30\/summer-games-the-lost-olympics\/"},"modified":"2024-07-30T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-07-30T08:00:00","slug":"summer-games-the-lost-olympics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextlevelnews.co.uk\/blog\/2024\/07\/30\/summer-games-the-lost-olympics\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer Games: The Lost Olympics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forgotten Gems is a regular column about notable games that have moved out of the public eye and may not be easily accessible anymore. To see all the other games I’ve covered so far, be sure to check out the <\/em>13 previous issues of Forgotten Gems<\/em><\/a> in our <\/em>Columns<\/em><\/a> section.<\/em><\/p>\n

First-person shooters. Roleplaying games. Action adventures. Even though they\u2019ve evolved significantly alongside the gaming hardware they run on, some of today\u2019s most-popular genres are multiple decades old and are likely here to stay for good. It\u2019s hard to imagine people not playing a Call of Duty game in 2030, just as it\u2019s unlikely that fighting games like Street Fighter and Tekken will just be over and done with in the foreseeable future. <\/p>\n

But some some genres have definitely diminished over the years to the point of almost disappearing entirely. Real-time strategy games \u2013 like StarCraft \u2013 at one time filled entire sports arenas of people eager to watch esports competitions. I haven\u2019t heard anyone mention the \u201cbrain training\u201d genre in years. Some bygone genres come complete with physical relics \u2013 literal skeletons in our closets: plastic guitars, fake drumkits, or even turntable controllers One of you \u2013 yes, I\u2019m talking to you \u2013 even still has that Tony Hawk skateboarding controller in his attic.<\/p>\n

We Have The Olympics at Home<\/h1>\n

As a kid, I couldn\u2019t have imagined that The Games would ever end. When we didn\u2019t know what else to do, a \u201cquick game\u201d of Epyx\u2019s Summer Games or Winter Games would inevitably fill an entire afternoon. As you may be able to guess just from their titles, Epyx\u2019s sports games simulated events you would find at the Olympic Games or in Track & Field competitions, with different control styles depending on the style of each event.<\/p>\n

Despite being one of the defining multiplayer game series of the \u201880s, these Commodore 64 (et al.) hits kept us busy until 1992 and then quickly vanished, essentially ending what we thought would be a game genre for the ages. <\/p>\n\n

There\u2019s not even a widely-accepted game sub-genre moniker to attach to them. \u201cMulti-event sports\u201d games, perhaps? But they were all the rage in the early \u201880s thanks to the genre-defining Olympic Decathlon created by Timothy W. Smith for the TRS-80, Tandy\u2019s home computer system sold via their Radio Shack stores (TRS stands for Tandy Radio Shack). This ten-event \u201ckey-masher\u201d really took off when it was ported to Apple II in 1982. It then got an even wider release year later on IBM PC under the name Microsoft Decathlon.<\/p>\n

Supercharger Summer Sweat<\/h2>\n

The team behind Summer Games previously worked on a multi-event party game called Party Mix for the Atari 2600 at developer Starpath Corporation. Designed for the Starpath Supercharger peripheral (basically a cassette tape deck for the 2600), Party Mix featured mini-games like tug-of-war and a handcar race that are clear progenitors of later events in the Games titles. A casualty of the video game crash of 1983, Epyx absorbed the Starpath team when they were concepting a Decathlon-inspired sports game called Sweat! <\/p>\n

The group picked Summer Games as their Epyx debut project. <\/p>\n

Summer Games, like Konami\u2019s 1983 arcade hit Track & Field (aka Hyper Olympic), took inspiration from Decathlon, but left behind the top-down track views of the original to try and create more realistic, TV-like visuals. The two games were developed in parallel, with Konami\u2019s game out of Japan becoming a major success in arcades and Summer Games targeting home computers instead. The race was on \u2013 and a new gaming genre was born. <\/p>\n

“Decathlon was our first choice, because it seemed like it would be easy to break up into discrete tasks that each programmer could work on without needing to interact.” – Scott Nelson<\/p>\n

\u201cI just remember the Apple II Decathlon game was being successful, or at least a lot of us were having fun with it at work,\u201d said Jon Leupp, who came over from Starpath and ended up designing and programming a number of memorable events in Epyx\u2019s Games. \u201cThe events were all so simple, and the fun was trying to beat each other\u2019s scores and of course to always trying to improve your own best score just a tiny bit more. We realized we could take the graphics to a whole new level so it seemed like a great project to move forward with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Getting Summer Games on Track<\/h1>\n

In a now-archived Epyx Shrine interview<\/a>, designer Scott Nelson, responsible for the framework and master control program, said that the choice to work on Summer Games was a pragmatic one: \u201cWhen Starpath and Epyx merged, we needed a C64 game quickly. That meant a project that five or six people could work on at the same time, and still actually reduce the time to market. Decathlon was our first choice, because it seemed like it would be easy to break up into discrete tasks that each programmer could work on without needing to interact.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

But the team didn\u2019t like some of the events included in decathlon and started from scratch to create a new list of events they wanted to include. \u201cWe had a big list of possible events, and picked the ones we thought would be easiest to do,\u201d said Nelson. \u201cSome of the events that looked hard ended up in Summer Games II.”<\/p>\n\n

The designers locked in six unique events and two variants \u2013 Pole Vault, Platform Diving, 4x400m Relay, 100m Dash, Gymnastics, Freestyle Relay Swimming, 100m Freestyle Swimming, and Skeet Shooting \u2013 and delivered the final game for release in 1984. <\/p>\n

While most of the events used a 2D side view, Skeet Shooting, developed by Leupp, took a different angle as the sole first-person perspective event.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cWe were trying hard in those original games to keep details like the scoring systems fairly accurate to the real world events. We also wanted to capture something of the feel of the mechanics, though clearly with a joystick and a button that\u2019s a bit of a stretch,\u201d he told me. \u201cFor Skeet Shooting I wanted the gravity of the gun barrel to come into play and force you to account for that as you swung through to lead the target. I studied the real world event rather than looking at any similar game mechanics, so that may explain my \u2018unique\u2019 approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

This courage to depart from the visual and gameplay templates of other events in the same package and include unique physics quirks to create wholly new experiences would become a defining trait for the Epyx Games series for years to come.<\/p>\n

Sprint to the Finish<\/h1>\n

While lightning fast by today\u2019s standards, the actual development process turned out far more interactive than Nelson originally envisioned, according to Leupp. \u201cWe were all in the same office. I believe we all designed our events ourselves but we discussed the initial designs as a group so we had buy-in from everyone,\u201d he recalls. \u201cWe were a good collaborative group so we\u2019d ask for and offer each other advice throughout development. There were no egos getting in the way. We all played each other\u2019s games as they came together, more for fun than as an official process, but of course that helped make all the games better.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Obviously, hitting a summer release window was crucial timing for a game called Summer Games \u2013 but more importantly, it arrived in time for the much-hyped 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Whether it was the perfect timing or the design team\u2019s wise decision to avoid the joystick-breaking, button-mashing approach of its contemporaries, Summer Games was a hit! <\/p>\n

Summer Games Musical Stylings<\/h2>\n

Epyx couldn\u2019t afford the official IOC license \u2013 but that didn\u2019t stop the developers from sneaking in a version of John Williams\u2019 Olympic Fanfare for its animated opening ceremony sequences. <\/p>\n

The country select screen, on the other hand, features matching national anthems \u2013 but with two notable exceptions. The developers mistook the socialist anthem \u201cThe Internationale\u201d for the Soviet anthem, while players who choose Australia are treated to the folk song \u201cWaltzing Matilda\u201d instead of the country\u2019s official anthem, \u201cAdvance Australia Fair\u201d.<\/p>\n

It seemed like the design team at Epyx had come up with a perfect formula for success. Critics and gamers liked the varied, and more technical approach to sports events \u2013 and this type of game could be developed fast while still maintaining a high quality level if the individual designers all delivered on their respective parts of the whole.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne fun thing is that different designers bring different approaches to events, so I think that brought a fun variety of experiences to the package that might not have been true if a single designer had made them all,\u201d said Leupp. \u201cAnother nice thing about multi-event games is it\u2019s easy to create more events, so when Summer Games turned out to be a huge hit, it only made sense to do Summer Games II, Winter Games, California Games, and others.\u201d<\/p>\n

Faster, Higher, Stronger, Gone<\/h1>\n

Long before Activision and EA talking about \u201cannualized franchises\u201d, Epyx started releasing a new \u201cGames\u201d title every year. Winter Games hit just months after Summer Games in 1984. Summer Games II followed in 1984. World Games in 1985. California Games in 1987. In 1988, the year of the Summer Olympic Games in Seoul, Korea, and the Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada, Epyx released two games under the new brand names The Games: Summer Edition and Winter Edition. But despite securing an official licensing deal from the 1988 U.S. Olympic Team, The Games weren\u2019t able to recapture the excitement of the earlier titles. <\/p>\n\n

The inevitable California Games II arrived almost as a footnote in 1990 for DOS PCs and was ported to other platforms, including the SNES, two years later. By then, Epyx had downsized significantly, laid off all but 20 employees \u2013 a tenth of its workforce just four years earlier \u2013 and shifted to exclusively work on Atari Lynx games. Whether it was oversaturation, or the company\u2019s choice to back ailing Atari instead of aligning with new market leader Nintendo, Epyx kept shrinking until its remaining assets were sold off to Bridgestone Multimedia and the company ceased to exist. <\/p>\n

\u201cEpyx went bankrupt because it never really understood why it had been successful in the past, and then decided to branch out in a lot of directions, all of which turned out to be failures”, programmer Stephen Landrum said in an archived interview<\/a> on a German fan site. <\/p>\n

While Epyx\u2019s sports games are not a household name today, you\u2019d be hard pressed to find gamers in their 50s who grew up playing games on C64 or Atari computers and couldn\u2019t immediately tell you their favorite. For me, personally, it never got better than the original Winter Games. Gorgeous art aside, there was just something special about how well that game rewarded players for learning the intricacies of its very technical controls. The Biathlon mode is almost a mini-adventure game of its own; the way it cycles through multiple screens before getting to the gun range! I have fond memories of playing arcade game competitor Track & Field as well (I used improvised contraptions such as a pen and pen-cap “seesaw” for maximum buttonmashery, just so I could rank higher than our local arcade machine\u2019s top-ranked players… Curse you, \u201cASS\u201d and \u201cSEX\u201d!) — but in the end, Summer and Winter Games will always remain my favorite sports games from those days.<\/p>\n

However, most of my friends will point to California Games as the one that stuck with them. Not only did California Games tackle surfing way before it became an Olympic discipline, programmer Jon Leupp blazed trails to create the first \u2013 and many would argue still best \u2013 surfing video (mini) game of all time. <\/p>\n

\u201cFor better or worse in my career, I never stopped to consider how difficult a task might be. If it was fun, I wanted to do it. So, the first challenge was to make an animated wave. Clearly that wasn\u2019t going to be done with sprites, so I wrote a character set animation tool and Susie Greene did a great job building a rolling wave with it\u201d, recalls Leupp. \u201cI studied wave physics and initially tried simulating those, then quickly punted and just used tables that I tweaked to make the motions feel reasonable. In the Lynx version the designer went wild and allowed quadruple flips and those sorts of things which actually made it super fun. I think that was the right thing to do for that new handheld device, and that new generation of games. In the original I was still trying to simulate real world competitive surfing. \u201c<\/p>\n

Where Can You Play it Now?<\/h1>\n

Just like MOBAs taking over from competitive RTS games or Rocket League becoming this generation’s NBA Jam, there is, of course, an heir to the decathlon-likes. All it took was for control methods to evolve \u2013 namely, via Nintendo\u2019s Wii Remote and Nunchuk \u2013 and suddenly every game publisher under both the summer and winter sun released multi-event sports competitions once again. Only, this time, players used gestures and Wii\u2019s version of button mashing, the dreaded \u201cwaggle\u201d. Even Mario & Sonic got in on it and headlined a series of officially-licensed, whimsical takes on the Olympic Games that lasted until the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.<\/p>\n

Wii Sports started the fad and became one of the most-played video games of all time, but like Epyx\u2019s Games, the new-found trend didn\u2019t last. Too many people waggled far too much in too little time and what looked like a new way to play quickly became an old way to never play again.<\/p>\n

“The genre feels timeless to me so I\u2019d be surprised to not see new incarnations of it in the future.” – Jon Leupp<\/p>\n

\u201cThe genre feels timeless to me so I\u2019d be surprised to not see new incarnations of it in the future,\u201d agrees Leupp, who left the games industry to work on slot machines for the last 27 years and just retired from that job in February to spend more time traveling with his wife and his two Australian Shepherd dogs. \u201cMaybe online leaderboards have replaced the charm of trying to outdo your friends scores on a single simple event, or a series of events, but I can still imagine creating games where those components are appealing.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can, of course, gather friends and family for a great time playing modern, more raucous takes on multi-event games like Nintendo\u2019s own Mario Party. But if you want to revisit the dinosaurs that didn\u2019t quite make it, you can pick up a Commodore 64 Mini micro-console<\/a> and play California Games, Summer Games II, World Games, and Winter Games with period-appropriate joysticks. <\/p>\n

If you don’t want any additional hardware in your home, Pixel Games UK licensed the rights for some of Epyx’s games and put out a 2022 Summer Games compilation<\/a> on Steam — but there’s a catch: it collects only the inferior ports (from Atari 2600 to ZX Spectrum), not the classic C64 edition or the decent Atari 8-bit conversion. The famed Atari Lynx version of California Games saw a re-release this year via The Epyx Collection: Handheld<\/a> on Nintendo Switch, courtesy of the same publisher. The lack of an IOC license is actually an advantage for game preservation as it\u2019s much easier for the games to get reissued without changes, so we’re bound to also see the C64 originals in more places in the future. <\/p>\n

The idea behind Summer Games lives on. I\u2019m hopeful that someday, someone will pick up the torch and assemble an ensemble of talented game designers to create the most realistic take on the world\u2019s most enduring athletic competition. Until then, you may just have to travel back to 1984 to relieve the genre\u2019s glory days. Or watch the real Olympics on TV.<\/p>\n

Peer Schneider<\/em><\/a> leads game guides and tools strategy across IGN, Map Genie, RockPaperShotGun, VG247, and Eurogamer. When Epyx didn’t work on a version of Winter Games for Atari computers, he started work on making his own. He got as far as creating all the background graphics and player animation for the biathlon event. <\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forgotten Gems is a regular column about notable games that have moved out of the public eye and may not be easily accessible anymore. To see all the other games I’ve covered so far, be sure to check out the 13 previous issues of Forgotten Gems in our Columns section. First-person shooters. Roleplaying games. Action […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nSummer Games: The Lost Olympics - Next Level News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Stay on top of the gaming world with Next Level News. 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