Summer Games II

Summer 1985, scorching heat, vacation, and me alone at the computer mashing the joystick so furiously that my skin almost peels off. Summer Games II from Epyx — this company knew how to squeeze the maximum out of 8-bit hardware, and this sequel proved it.

It's a sports compilation released a year after the first installment, which was tied to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. The sequel expands the roster of disciplines — you'll find events like rowing, equestrian sports, gymnastics, or triple jump, sports that were missing from the first game. The premise is simple: pick a country from fifteen available options, or play as Epyx as the sixteenth choice, and collect medals discipline by discipline, solo or with a group of friends at one keyboard.

The controls rely on the then-typical principle of button-mashing and wiggling — either vibrate your fingers raw or accept defeat with composure. On the PC version, this was sometimes a pain without a joystick, because a keyboard simply wasn't built for rapid rhythmic inputs. Some disciplines are straightforward and satisfying, others demand timing that only clicks after the third, fourth, tenth attempt. Multiplayer on one machine was a lifesaver — competing live with a friend from down the street gave the whole thing a sense of purpose that single-player alone couldn't deliver.

Epyx held a firm grip on the sports compilation genre in the mid-eighties, and Summer Games II is proof of that. The graphics held up for the time, the music and sounds were modest on PC, but on the C64 version — that was a different world entirely. Today the game shows its age visibly: the disciplines are brief, depth is nonexistent, and without nostalgic value or a live opponent, the fun is appropriately limited. A few sports, though, work surprisingly well even now, purely thanks to their simplicity.

Anyone who sat at this as a kid knows why they'd come back — if only for twenty minutes. For everyone else, it's a fascinating historical document from an era when "sports game" meant mashing keys to a rhythm and shouting at the monitor. Fire it up in your browser with no installation, and that's exactly the format this kind of game deserves.