Summer Games

Summer Games was published by Epyx in 1984 and it founded an entire genre on the Commodore 64. Eight events inspired by the summer Olympics — among them pole vault, platform diving, sprinting, swimming relays, gymnastics and skeet shooting — and support for up to eight players who pick a country and a flag and pass a single joystick around.

That social side is why it succeeded. Nobody played Summer Games alone; you played it in a group, around one television, with escalating trash talk and a running argument about who held the record. Epyx supported that with an opening ceremony, national anthems for the selectable countries, and a records table saved to disk. The presentation was remarkable for 1984.

As a game it is mixed. Some events are inventive: diving demands you time the take-off, the rotations and the entry, and comes with its own judging. Gymnastics and pole vault work in a similar register. Other events are built on waggling the joystick side to side as fast as possible, which was the standard of the day, is tiring now, and destroyed an uncountable number of sticks in the eighties — something the magazines reported entirely straight-faced.

How well it has aged depends on who is in the room. Alone, within five minutes you notice you are repeating one motion. With three or four people it is still fun, because the core is not simulation but competition.

Epyx followed the success with a whole line — Winter Games, World Games, California Games — and that series defined what a multi-event sports game looked like for the next decade. Summer Games is where it starts, and in that sense it is a mandatory entry in 8-bit history.