In the summer of 1984, while Los Angeles held the Olympic Games, Commodore 64 owners could hold their own: pick a country, watch an opening ceremony with the Olympic flame and a flight of doves, then compete in eight events and stand on a podium while the winner’s national anthem played. Epyx had no Olympic licence, so it called the game Summer Games. The formula it set was copied for the rest of the decade, not least by Epyx itself.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Epyx. Project manager Craig Nelson; programmers included Brian McGhie, Stephen Landrum, Randy Glover, John Leupp and Steve Mudry.
- Released: 1984, for the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers.
- UK publisher: Quicksilva, under licence.
- Players: one to eight.
- Events: eight, from the pole vault to skeet shooting.
- Followed by: Summer Games II (1985), Winter Games (1985), World Games (1986) and California Games (1987).
A race against the calendar
The game began with a merger. In November 1983 Epyx took over Starpath, the company Craig Nelson and Bob Brown had founded in 1981 to make home video games, and gained about a dozen programmers. With an Olympic year coming, the Starpath team looked again at a Decathlon game of their own that had never been released, and Epyx encouraged Nelson to make something like it for home computers. Ten events were planned; time cut them to eight.
Epyx had thought about an official licence, but Atari already held the rights to the 1984 Games. Bob Botch, Epyx’s vice-president of marketing, remembered that this ruled out titles such as “L.A. Olympics” and “L.A. Games”, and that “Summer Games” was “a strong title that kept us out of trouble”. It also freed Epyx to keep the Soviet Union in the game after the Soviet boycott was announced. Botch said Epyx sent the Soviet embassy in Washington copies of the game, with a letter saying that at least they could take part in this version of the Games. The package came back with a thank-you note, because the embassy had only Atari computers, so Epyx sent the Atari version instead.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1984, Nelson found that a rival team, 3-2-1 Software, was secretly making an Olympic game of its own for the Commodore 64, later sold as HesGames, and had announced a June release. Epyx pulled programmers off other projects. Nelson recalled staying up all night, working the day shift and then a second night, and finishing the game one night for it to go into production the next morning.
The events
| Event | What you do |
|---|---|
| Pole vault | Choose your grip and the height of the bar, run up and plant the pole |
| Platform diving | Dive from the platform; the judges mark how vertically you enter the water |
| 4 × 400 metres relay | Pace each runner’s stamina, shown by a bar that changes colour |
| 100 metres dash | Move the joystick fast, or in a circle |
| Gymnastics | A vault over the horse |
| 4 × 100 metres freestyle relay | A head-to-head swimming race |
| 100 metres freestyle | The same pool, one swimmer |
| Skeet shooting | Aim at clay targets from eight stations |
The team built each event from the real sport. McGhie modelled the relay runners and stadium on photographs from old issues of Sports Illustrated. Landrum plotted his dives on paper, and the judges scored only how vertically the diver entered the water, with four different splashes to match. His pole vault needed three separate programs just to generate its data. Leupp added shadows to his skeet shooting stations and targets, along with a giant flamingo that did not make the final game. The opening ceremony, which borrowed Dennis Caswell’s running man from Impossible Mission, took about 6K of code and 10K of data, and the Olympic flame took three days and three attempts.
Finding the anthems was a job of its own. The music came from books, consulates and Epyx’s overseas sales staff, and Denmark’s was the hardest to find. Nelson said the whole task took about a month. Epyx put itself on the list of nations too, with its logo as a flag and the music from Jumpman as its anthem.
Reception
Electronic Games opened its review with the ceremony, “a joy to the eyes and ears”, and ended: “Summer Games definitely earns a gold medal.” Its readers voted it one of the 27 winners of the magazine’s 1985 Arcade Awards. Home Computer Magazine compared it with HesGames and Activision’s Decathlon in September 1984 and gave Summer Games the gold, for realism. RUN was surprised by how seriously Epyx had treated the subject, with “practically every in-house C-64 programmer” on the project, and singled out the skeet shooting’s scenery.
In Britain the game came out under licence through Quicksilva, at £14.95 on cassette and £19.95 on disk, because, as Your Commodore reported, CBS Software, which was due to handle Epyx’s games, was not ready in time. A year later ZZAP!64 could describe it as “widely accepted as the greatest of the multitude of sports simulations available”. What set it apart, the magazine said, was that each event had its own control method, instead of relying on “heavy (and sweaty!) joystick waggling”.
Asked what happened after Summer Games came out, Botch laughed: “We made a lot of money.”
Summer Games II
Nelson’s team started planning a sequel three or four months after the first game went on sale, using events left out of Summer Games for lack of memory and time. Some wanted it to be a winter game, but a spring release suited a warm-weather theme better, so Summer Games II had eight more summer events: cycling, fencing, kayaking, the triple jump, rowing, the high jump, the javelin and an equestrian event. Four programmers and an artist wrote it in about six months. It reached Britain in the summer of 1985 as one of the first Epyx games published there by U.S. Gold, at £9.95 on cassette. Nelson admitted that the high jump’s viewpoint made it hard to play: “I’m still not totally satisfied with the end result.”
The Games series
| Title | Year | Theme |
|---|---|---|
| Summer Games | 1984 | Summer Olympic events |
| Summer Games II | 1985 | Eight more summer events |
| Winter Games | 1985 | Winter Olympic events |
| World Games | 1986 | Sports from around the world, such as cliff diving and caber tossing |
| California Games | 1987 | Surfing, skateboarding and other Californian pastimes |
| The Games: Summer Edition and The Games: Winter Edition | 1988 | Licensed by the U.S. Olympic Committee |
Summer Games also reached the Atari 7800, where it was among the games on sale in America by 1989.
Sources
- John Jermaine, “Epyx and the Quest for Olympic Gold”, Commodore Magazine, July 1988, pp. 51–53 and 96–100: interviews with Bob Botch, Craig Nelson and Matt Householder (Starpath and its unreleased Decathlon, the Olympic licence, the title, the Soviet embassy, the team and its events, HesGames, the anthems, Summer Games II).
- John Jermaine, “All About Epyx”, Commodore Magazine, August 1989: interview with Bob Botch (“We made a lot of money”).
- COMPUTE!’s Gazette, June 1984: Epyx Summer Games advertisement.
- Electronic Games, November 1984, pp. 49–50: review by Arnie Katz. January 1985, p. 22: the 1985 Arcade Awards (“Summer Games (Epyx/Atari, C-64)”).
- Home Computer Magazine, vol. 4 no. 4, September 1984: Summer Games, HesGames and Decathlon compared.
- RUN, October 1984, p. 18: Summer Games review.
- Computer & Video Games, December 1984: Quicksilva advertisement. Commodore Horizons, January 1985, p. 70: £14.95 cassette, £19.95 disk.
- Your Commodore, March 1985: Summer Games released under licence to Quicksilva because CBS Software was not ready.
- ZZAP!64, issue 5, September 1985, p. 16: Summer Games II review (US Gold/Epyx, £9.95; Summer Games “as marketed in Britain by Quicksilva”). The same issue: U.S. Gold’s Summer Games II advertisement (the eight events, 18 countries).
- ACE, issue 21, June 1989: Atari 7800 titles available in the United States.