“Here we go again with button bashing to wake the dead,” Personal Computer Games sighed in October 1984, when Konami’s Hyper Sports reached Britain’s arcades. A year earlier Konami’s Track & Field had players hammering two run buttons to race a sprinter down a track. Hyper Sports kept the hammering and added events that punished it: an arrow released a fraction of a degree off, or a triple jump launched at the wrong angle, ended the game as surely as a slow swim. In 1985 it became one of the first big hits for the revived Imagine label, and on home computers the buttons became a joystick, shaken from side to side as hard as the player dared.
Fast facts
- Arcade: Konami, 1984; seven events, up to four players.
- Home versions: Imagine, 1985–86, for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and BBC Micro; the Spectrum and Commodore 64 versions have six of the seven events.
- Spectrum: 48K, £7.95; programmed by Jonathan ‘Joffa’ Smith; 92% in CRASH.
- Commodore 64: £8.95, music by Martin Galway; 80% in ZZAP!64.
- Charts: number two in the Gallup Spectrum chart in summer 1985; number one in CRASH‘s readers’ chart in November 1985.
The arcade game
The coin-op had seven events, and a player had to reach a qualifying mark in each to go on to the next. It opened with the 100 metres freestyle, to be swum in under two minutes: hammering a run button made the swimmer go, and pressing the jump button when prompted let him breathe. Skeet shooting came next, with aiming boxes that tracked the clay pigeons automatically and a button for each side. Then came the long horse, archery, the triple jump, weightlifting and, last and hardest, the pole vault. Personal Computer Games found the sports “a little more varied than in Track and Field but the skills and aims are the same”, and promised it was “bound to raise a sweat”.
Looking back in 1995, Edge thought Hyper Sports still the best of the genre. Swimming and weightlifting were “simple all-out wagglers”, but archery and the triple jump “demanded pixel-perfect timing and carefully controlled button presses and releases”. Playing it again eleven years on, Edge wrote, showed “not how basic the game was but how naive the description ‘joystick basher’ is”.
Imagine’s comeback
Liverpool’s Imagine Software had collapsed in July 1984, and Ocean bought its name. Ocean used the label for arcade conversions from Konami, and Hyper Sports followed World Series Baseball as one of the first. CRASH’s reviewers welcomed it as “the real follow-up to Daley Thompson’s Decathlon”, Ocean’s own multi-event game of 1984, and as proof “that Imagine are well on their way back to the top”.
The Spectrum version had six of the seven events; like the Commodore 64 version, it left out the pole vault. CRASH found it remarkably close to the coin-op, “even down to the bird which flies across the screen when you get a maximum on the skeet shooting”, and its swimming instructions were blunt: “Smash the keyboard (or your joystick) to bits to get speed.” Weightlifting was “a pound-your-Spectrum-keyboard-through-the-floor screen”. But one reviewer pointed out that the game “isn’t just a test of brute strength like its predecessor, but involves timing and skill too”, and another warned that it was “really frustrating having to go back to the start if the odd arrow is a couple of points of a degree out”. It scored 92%. In the September 1985 tips pages, a reader advised waiting until the vaulter’s legs were almost vertical, then pressing fire “and waggle the joystick like mad”; for the weightlifting he recommended “a really good joystick (like a Kempston)”.
CRASH’s review did not name a programmer. Jonathan Smith, who went on to write Mikie and Green Beret for Imagine, is remembered by his Ocean colleague Paul Hughes as the man who “programmed and provided the graphics” for Hyper Sports.
The other versions
ZZAP!64 reviewed the Commodore 64 version in September 1985. Its reviewer described the swimmer being driven “by hurling your joystick from side to side” and the vaulter’s somersaults by an instruction to “hurl the joystick around the room”. It gave the game 80% overall and 94% for “hookability”, with the note “Will your joystick stand it?” Martin Galway’s music for it included his version of Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire, which he wrote from memory before Ocean had the rights.
Ocean’s history records two more conversions. Simon Cobb wrote the archery, triple jump and swimming for the Amstrad CPC version; he had never seen anyone do a triple jump, and implemented it “as just three jumps”, not a hop, a step and a jump. Richard Kay converted it to the BBC Micro, “a fantastic machine”, he said, before leaving Ocean in 1985. The Amstrad version did badly: AMTIX! gave it 30%, complaining of “poor sprites, feeble animation”.
In the charts
Hyper Sports sold. In the Gallup Spectrum chart that Sinclair User printed, it was number two for the months ending 19 July and 23 August 1985, and still fifth in mid-September. CRASH‘s Hotline chart, compiled from readers’ votes, shows how long it stayed popular. It entered at 16 in September 1985 and was voted to number one in November. It was second for the next two months, fifth in February 1986, and eighth from March to June. It was still in the readers’ top thirty at the end of the year.
Sources
- “Arcade Angle”, Personal Computer Games issue 11, October 1984, p. 103: the Hyper Sports coin-op (“button bashing to wake the dead”; seven events; the swimming, skeet shooting and long horse; “bound to raise a sweat”).
- Retroview, Edge issue 23, August 1995, p. 79: Hyper Sports (arcade 1984, home 1985; 1–4 players; seven events, the pole vault last; “how naive the description ‘joystick basher’ is”).
- CRASH issue 19, August 1985, pp. 25–26: Hyper Sports review (Imagine, 48K, £7.95; six events; “the real follow-up to Daley Thompson’s Decathlon”; the bird; the swimming and weightlifting; “timing and skill”; the arrow; 92%).
- CRASH issue 20, September 1985, p. 69: playing tips for Hyper Sports from Alan Cowan (the vault; “a really good joystick (like a Kempston)”); p. 70: Hotline chart (Hypersports at 16).
- CRASH Hotline charts, issues 21 to 35 (October 1985 to December 1986): 2, 1, 2, 2, 5, 8, 8, 8, 8, 14, 28, 30, 23, 19, 29.
- Sinclair User issue 42, September 1985; issue 43, October 1985; issue 44, November 1985: Gallup Spectrum charts for the months ending 19 July, 23 August and 14 September 1985.
- ZZAP!64 issue 5, September 1985, pp. 13–14: Commodore 64 Hyper Sports review (Imagine, £8.95; no pole vault; “hurl the joystick around the room”; “Will your joystick stand it?”; 80%).
- AMTIX! issue 5, March 1986, p. 23: Amstrad CPC Hypersports review (30%).
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (2013), pp. 132–133 (Simon Cobb on the Amstrad version), p. 202 (Richard Kay on the BBC Micro version), p. 254 (Paul Hughes’s tribute to Jonathan Smith).
- The Martin Galway entry and its sources: Chariots of Fire in the Commodore 64 version. The Ocean Software and Imagine Software entries: Imagine’s liquidation and Ocean’s use of the name. The Christian Urquhart entry: Daley Thompson’s Decathlon.