LogFAQs > #986771033

I was going to post one per night, but y'know what? I feel like putting one up now.

45. Summer Games
Created by Epyx
Release year: 1984
Platform: Commodore 64
Guesstimated playtime: <100 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Xqd904vC5Nc

In the early days of home computing, Microsoft systems were pretty damn bad for gaming. But you know what wasn't? The Commodore freaking 64. Load times kinda sucked, but the graphics and sound were a full decade ahead of anything you'd find on DOS. It was also really easy to find a bunch of My First Computer Program games, and we had a stack of like a hundred floppy disks all with *something* on them, often large collections of (mostly) games written in BASIC. Very few could be considered commercial products, though. As a kid I'd hop between all of these, but the one noteworthy "real" game that I played was Summer Games.

Unable to directly name drop the Olympics, Epyx made a series of mini-games for you and your friends to compete in ranging from gymnastics to pole vault to diving. The 100m dash was especially bad for incentivizing you to palm the tip of your joystick and grind it in a circle as fast as possible, the likes of which we didn't really see again until Mario Party. Oh, yeah. Remember joysticks? Hot damn, nobody uses those things any more, but they were everywhere in the 80s until Nintendo said "nah, we got a better idea."

My copy of Summer Games was clearly pirated, and wasn't even a clean copy because whenever we'd load the swimming event, weird artifacts would glitch all over the screen. But as a kid -- this game released when I was four -- with nothing better to do, I would queue up as many players as possible, and then play as all of them until I learned the best possible strategies for all the events. On the off-chance I did have someone over to play real multiplayer, I would completely crush them, but the game had a way of making even people who didn't know what they were doing feel at least somewhat capable. I also learned a lot of national anthems through this game (or at least the first few bars of them.)

Related games: There was also a Summer Games II which I didn't own but got to play a little of at friends' houses. The events in that one felt weird and foreign to me, probably because their implementation was a bit more ambitious. The game was objectively better in terms of performance, though. Winter Games was a title we had at school, and I would often play while waiting for my parents to come home in the after-school program at my elementary school. Because there were inherently other kids around, we almost always got to play that one multiplayer. However, that was the Apple IIe version which ran like a potato compared to the C64.

Still, one of my favorite memories as a gamer happened on that copy of Winter Games when an older kid, Matt, thought he was going to win overall and everything had come down to my final run on bobsled. As I sat in front of the computer to navigate the lefts and rights to make the turns, I felt something close over my eyes. Matt was covering my sight! Rather than fighting him on it, I just navigated the course on muscle memory alone and somehow managed to not crash the sled. In fact, I even got the fastest attempt out of anyone on that run (including my two previous attempts) and ended up winning gold on bobsled and first place in the standings as a result.

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Up next: Another equally old game that's too obscure for anyone to guess. It's also the only other sports game unless racing counts.