“All you have to do is walk by any arcade or game room that has a Track & Field to know what I mean,” an American magazine wrote in March 1984. “The sound of hands pounding down on the control panel will reverberate out over the surrounding noise, while the usual throng of onlookers will be crowded around watching the competition.” Konami’s athletics game had no joystick. It had two red run buttons, set wide apart, and a white button between them to jump or throw. To run faster, players hit the run buttons faster, and in pubs, arcades and railway buffets they pounded them as hard as they could.
Fast facts
- Developer: Konami, 1983. In Japan it was called Hyper Olympic.
- In America: licensed to Centuri, which showed it at the AMOA trade show in late 1983.
- Events: 100 metres, long jump, javelin, 110 metres hurdles, hammer throw and high jump.
- Players: up to four at once.
- Controls: two run buttons and one jump/throw button.
- Sequel: Hyper Sports (1984).
Six events, three buttons
The game is a run of qualifying rounds. Each event has a minimum time, distance or height, and a player who misses it is out. The 100 metres opens the meeting and is pure speed. In the long jump the athlete builds speed down the runway and the player must press the jump button before the foul line and hold it long enough to get the right angle; there are three attempts. The javelin works the same way with a shorter run-up. The 110 metres hurdles needs both hands at once, pounding the run buttons and timing the jump button for each hurdle, with only one attempt. In the hammer throw one press of a run button sets the athlete spinning and the throw button releases. The high jump ends the sequence: run, jump, then press again to set the angle over the bar, with three faults allowed. The top three performances are kept on screen as “world records”, with the players’ initials.
Video Games magazine’s account of the game shows why it stood out. “Up to four players can compete head-to-head”, and Konami gave every event “a minimum goal you’re out to exceed, with the extra incentive for standout performances being the chance to have your initials and accomplishment displayed on screen”. It was a game people watched as well as played: “just as Track & Field is fun to play, so too is it fun to watch others try their hand at qualifying from one event to the next.”
Made for an Olympic year
Centuri, the American company that licensed Konami’s arcade games, wanted something to sell in the year of the Los Angeles Olympics. Its president, Arnold Kaminkow, told Video Games that planning had begun in January 1983. “I also knew that I wanted a theme that was athletic and would tie in with the Olympics of 1984,” he said. “There were many trips back and forth to Japan where the game was being developed.” He wanted players to work for it: “I wanted them to be aggressive when they played Track & Field, not passively content to follow a prescribed pattern for mastering the game.” When the American amusement trade met at the AMOA show in late 1983, most attention was on laserdisc games, but, the magazine reported, Track & Field “was the predominant model on display” on Centuri’s stand. To keep players coming back, Centuri offered operators a promotion with “High Score of the Week” and “High Score of the Month” trophies.
In Japan, Computer & Video Games’ Tokyo correspondent found Hyper Olympics “the best” of a wave of sports games in the arcades in 1984. Konami ran a Hyper Olympics competition in Tokyo that February, with a trip to the Los Angeles Olympics as first prize. In Britain, Your Computer wrote in January 1984 that “all over the western world one arcade game dominated the summer”: Track and Field “could be found in pubs, clubs and railway buffets everywhere”. It was still near the top at the end of the Olympic year: in December 1984 Electronic Games placed it second in its chart of the most popular coin-op videogames, after seven months on the list.
At home
On MSX computers Konami sold it as Hyper Olympic, on two cartridges. The first had the 100 metres, long jump, hammer and 400 metres; the second the hurdles, javelin, high jump and 1500 metres. Konami also sold the Hyper Shot, a two-button pad that plugged into the joystick port. Your Computer’s reviewer found it improved his scores and saved him “from totally destroying my stock of joysticks”.
On British home computers the first athletics games of this kind were not Konami’s. The run buttons became a joystick, waggled from side to side, and CRASH later described Ocean’s Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (1984) as one of “a spate of releases that were firmly based on the arcade hit Track And Field”. Konami’s own Commodore 64 version arrived only at the end of 1987. ZZAP!64 found it “fairly close to the arcade original” and “still very addictive and playable, especially when two players participate”, but at £8.95 “far, far too expensive for what’s on offer” when the “far superior” Decathlon cost much less, and gave it 61%. A Spectrum version appeared on Ocean’s sports compilation Game Set and Match 2, where Your Sinclair dismissed it in February 1989 as a poor joystick waggler: “No Daley Thompson’s Decathalon this.”
On the NES, Track & Field was on Nintendo Power’s list of available games in its first issue, in July 1988, and Konami followed it with Track & Field II that winter.
Hyper Sports
Konami’s sequel, Hyper Sports, reached arcades in 1984 with seven new events, from swimming and skeet shooting to the pole vault, and up to four players. It kept the run buttons but asked for more timing; that entry tells its story, including the Spectrum conversion by Jonathan ‘Joffa’ Smith that CRASH gave 92%.
Sources
- Video Games (US) vol. 2 no. 5, February 1984: Centuri advertisement (“Featuring six popular events”; “Copyright 1983 Konami Industry Company, Ltd.”); report on the 1983 AMOA show (Track & Field “the predominant model on display” at Centuri).
- Video Games (US) vol. 2 no. 6, March 1984, pp. 24–27: “Going for the Gold” (the controls and events, qualifying, world records, Arnold Kaminkow’s account, the trophy promotion).
- Your Computer, January 1984, p. 18: review of Konami’s Hyper Olympics for MSX (the arcade game in “pubs, clubs and railway buffets”; two cartridges and their events; the Hyper Shot).
- Computer & Video Games issue 32, June 1984, p. 147: report from Tokyo’s arcades (Hyper Olympics, its six events, Konami’s competition and the Los Angeles prize).
- Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 17, December 1984, p. 46: “Most Popular Coin-Op Videogames” (second, seven months on the list); also news of Hyper Sports, “the sequel to Track & Field”.
- CRASH issue 48, January 1988: feature on sporting licences (Daley Thompson’s Decathlon and the releases “firmly based on” Track and Field).
- ZZAP!64 issue 33, Christmas Special 1987, p. 14: Commodore 64 Track and Field review (Konami, £8.95 cassette; 61%).
- Your Sinclair issue 38, February 1989, p. 67: Game Set and Match 2 compilation review (Ocean, £12.95 cassette).
- Nintendo Power issue 1, July–August 1988: list of NES games, including Track & Field; issue 3, November–December 1988: Track & Field II.
- The Hyper Sports entry and its sources.