Summer Games: The Lost Olympics
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 adventures. Even though they’ve evolved significantly alongside the gaming hardware they run on, some of today’s most-popular genres are multiple decades old and are likely here to stay for good. It’s hard to imagine people not playing a Call of Duty game in 2030, just as it’s unlikely that fighting games like Street Fighter and Tekken will just be over and done with in the foreseeable future.
But some some genres have definitely diminished over the years to the point of almost disappearing entirely. Real-time strategy games – like StarCraft – at one time filled entire sports arenas of people eager to watch esports competitions. I haven’t heard anyone mention the “brain training” genre in years. Some bygone genres come complete with physical relics – literal skeletons in our closets: plastic guitars, fake drumkits, or even turntable controllers One of you – yes, I’m talking to you – even still has that Tony Hawk skateboarding controller in his attic.
As a kid, I couldn’t have imagined that The Games would ever end. When we didn’t know what else to do, a “quick game” of Epyx’s Summer Games or Winter Games would inevitably fill an entire afternoon. As you may be able to guess just from their titles, Epyx’s 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.
Despite being one of the defining multiplayer game series of the ‘80s, 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.
There’s not even a widely-accepted game sub-genre moniker to attach to them. “Multi-event sports” games, perhaps? But they were all the rage in the early ‘80s thanks to the genre-defining Olympic Decathlon created by Timothy W. Smith for the TRS-80, Tandy’s home computer system sold via their Radio Shack stores (TRS stands for Tandy Radio Shack). This ten-event “key-masher” 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.
Summer Games, like Konami’s 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’s game out of Japan becoming a major success in arcades and Summer Games targeting home computers instead. The race was on – and a new gaming genre was born.
“I just remember the Apple II Decathlon game was being successful, or at least a lot of us were having fun with it at work,” said Jon Leupp, who came over from Starpath and ended up designing and programming a number of memorable events in Epyx’s Games. “The events were all so simple, and the fun was trying to beat each other’s 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.”
In a now-archived Epyx Shrine interview, designer Scott Nelson, responsible for the framework and master control program, said that the choice to work on Summer Games was a pragmatic one: “When 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.”
But the team didn’t like some of the events included in decathlon and started from scratch to create a new list of events they wanted to include. “We had a big list of possible events, and picked the ones we thought would be easiest to do,” said Nelson. “Some of the events that looked hard ended up in Summer Games II.”
The designers locked in six unique events and two variants – Pole Vault, Platform Diving, 4x400m Relay, 100m Dash, Gymnastics, Freestyle Relay Swimming, 100m Freestyle Swimming, and Skeet Shooting – and delivered the final game for release in 1984.
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.
“We 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’s a bit of a stretch,” he told me. “For 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 ‘unique’ approach.”
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.
While lightning fast by today’s standards, the actual development process turned out far more interactive than Nelson originally envisioned, according to Leupp. “We 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,” he recalls. “We were a good collaborative group so we’d ask for and offer each other advice throughout development. There were no egos getting in the way. We all played each other’s games as they came together, more for fun than as an official process, but of course that helped make all the games better.”
Obviously, hitting a summer release window was crucial timing for a game called Summer Games – 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’s wise decision to avoid the joystick-breaking, button-mashing approach of its contemporaries, Summer Games was a hit!
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 – 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.
“One 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,” said Leupp. “Another nice thing about multi-event games is it’s 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.”
Long before Activision and EA talking about “annualized franchises”, Epyx started releasing a new “Games” 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’t able to recapture the excitement of the earlier titles.
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 – a tenth of its workforce just four years earlier – and shifted to exclusively work on Atari Lynx games. Whether it was oversaturation, or the company’s 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.
“Epyx 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 on a German fan site.
While Epyx’s sports games are not a household name today, you’d be hard pressed to find gamers in their 50s who grew up playing games on C64 or Atari computers and couldn’t 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’s top-ranked players… Curse you, “ASS” and “SEX”!) — but in the end, Summer and Winter Games will always remain my favorite sports games from those days.
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 – and many would argue still best – surfing video (mini) game of all time.
“For 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’t 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”, recalls Leupp. “I 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. “
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 – namely, via Nintendo’s Wii Remote and Nunchuk – 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’s version of button mashing, the dreaded “waggle”. 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.
Wii Sports started the fad and became one of the most-played video games of all time, but like Epyx’s Games, the new-found trend didn’t 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.
“The genre feels timeless to me so I’d be surprised to not see new incarnations of it in the future,” 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. “Maybe 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.”
You can, of course, gather friends and family for a great time playing modern, more raucous takes on multi-event games like Nintendo’s own Mario Party. But if you want to revisit the dinosaurs that didn’t quite make it, you can pick up a Commodore 64 Mini micro-console and play California Games, Summer Games II, World Games, and Winter Games with period-appropriate joysticks.
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 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 on Nintendo Switch, courtesy of the same publisher. The lack of an IOC license is actually an advantage for game preservation as it’s 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.
The idea behind Summer Games lives on. I’m 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’s most enduring athletic competition. Until then, you may just have to travel back to 1984 to relieve the genre’s glory days. Or watch the real Olympics on TV.
Peer Schneider 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.
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