Hypersports
Joffa, and the destruction of joysticks
Konami's multi-event arcade game converted by Joffa Smith for Imagine — number one in November 1985, and the game that taught a generation what a broken joystick sounds like.
Konami’s Hyper Sports, converted to the Spectrum by Jonathan ‘Joffa’ Smith for Imagine — one of the games CRASH’s reader ranking credits him with, alongside Green Beret and Cobra.
Chart performance
CRASH charts, 7 appearances:
| Date | Position |
|---|---|
| Oct 1985 | #2 |
| Nov 1985 | #1 |
| Dec 1985 | #2 |
| Mar 1986 | #8 |
| May 1986 | #22 |
| Jun 1986 | #8 |
Straight in near the top, a month at number one, and then a long staggered decline with a curious bounce back to #8 in June. Sports and multi-event games kept getting picked up again — they are the titles people played with other people, so they outlived their own novelty.
The waggle
Hypersports belongs to the genre Daley Thompson’s Decathlon had established a year earlier: several events, each won by moving the joystick left and right as fast as physically possible.
It is worth being precise about why this worked, because it looks crude and was not.
It needs no explanation. A child can be handed the controls and be competitive in four seconds. There is no learning curve at all.
It is a physical contest, not a skill contest. Two players at one machine are not comparing reflexes or knowledge — they are comparing how hard they are prepared to punish a £9.99 joystick, in front of each other.
It made the hardware part of the game. Joysticks broke. Microswitched sticks were sold on their ability to survive this genre. A game that consumes peripherals is a game with a merchandising tail nobody planned.
The waggler is the purest example in this Vault of a design that ignores the computer’s strengths entirely and uses the room instead.