Microsoft Decathlon

Decathlon on a computer — in 1982, that must have seemed like a brilliant idea. Take decathlon, add a microprocessor, and you've got entertainment for the whole family on some Apple II or Commodore 64. Reality turned out to be a bit more modest.

Microsoft Decathlon is a straightforward sports simulator where you tackle various athletic disciplines one after another. Long jump, javelin throw, races of different distances — the game lines up several athletes and lets them compete. Graphics? Pixelated figures, not many of them fitting on screen, stretched vertically the way you only see on old CRT monitors now. Sound typical of computers from that era — squeaky notes that tell you "You messed up" when you fail.

Playing is abstract and often frustratingly unclear. I do the long jump by pressing a button at the right moment — it's not about physics, but about timing. Throws come down to timing, sprints to button-mashing. The game seems simply controlled, yet you often can't figure out why one attempt worked well and the next one didn't. You'd want it to be straightforward, but it never quite is. Still, there's a passion buried in what Microsoft put here — you want to win, you want a better time — that's where their intent lies locked away.

In the nineties, when we'd fire up old floppies, we mostly played these out of curiosity and nostalgia. Today it looks like an archaeological artifact — proof that even in the early eighties, someone believed the computer would be a place for entertainment too. The mechanics are primitive, but there's no malice in it. Just the stark truth: here's sports without graphics, without atmosphere, without reason why anyone would run it twice.

If you're curious where it all began and want to see what computer gaming looked like in that era's imagination, you can fire it up in a browser or emulator. It's not bad — it's just very old and, without exaggeration, dull. Microsoft Decathlon is an honest attempt at something that later became entertainment. Here it's just the skeleton of an idea.