Superstar Indoor Sports

1987, late afternoon. It's raining outside, my parents are at work, and I have an hour of pure computer time ahead of me. But then I fire up Superstar Indoor Sports and instead of one game, I get four. That counted for something back then.

DesignStar Consultants built the whole concept around the idea of an indoor sports center — under one roof, bowling, darts, air hockey, and table tennis. No story, no campaign. Pure pick-up-and-play before that term even existed. Each of the four disciplines works as its own little title, yet the compilation is bundled into one executable package.

The controls are typical for PC games from the second half of the eighties — keyboard, sometimes mouse, depending on the sport. Air hockey and ping-pong benefit from quick reflex response and are most fun with two players on one keyboard, which was absolutely the standard way to spend an afternoon with a classmate back in 1987. Darts are turn-based and more relaxed, bowling relies on timing. Four different difficulty levels — from beginner to Superstar — at least suggest the developers expected someone to actually finish the game and want more.

What Superstar Indoor Sports brought, mainly, was convenience. You didn't have to hunt for four different games on four different floppy disks. The graphics are exactly what you'd expect from an EGA title from 1987 — functional, unpretentious. Sound came through the PC speaker, so imagine something between a beep and a bucket being knocked over. That's not a complaint, that was reality back then. Today that's what ages worst — not the visuals, those have at least a retro charm, but the audio can convince you to mute the volume within the first thirty seconds.

Today this game suits anyone looking for a quick nostalgic pit stop or showing kids what games looked like when their parents were small. Air hockey and ping-pong with two people are still solid entertainment for ten minutes. Nothing more, but nothing to be ashamed of either. Fire it up in your browser with no installation and no regrets — exactly how a game like this should be played in 2024.