Summer Games is a 1984 sports video game developed and published by Epyx. Based on sports from the Summer Olympic Games, the game was released in 1984 for the Commodore 64, and was later ported to the Apple II, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari 8-bit computers, and Master System.

In the UK, the game was first released by Quicksilva On most versions, world records can be saved to the floppy disk.

The Commodore 64 version allows players to link Summer Games and Summer Games II to engage in one large Olympics, accumulating medals in a tournament from both games.

Events

The events available vary slightly depending on the platform, and include pole vault, platform diving, sprinting, gymnastics, freestyle swimming, and skeet shooting. It was inspired by earlier titles like Microsoft's Olympic Decathlon. While Sweat! was still in development Epyx purchased the ailing Starpath company. Work on the game was halted, because of the video game crash of 1983. All in-development Supercharger games were canceled and existing Supercharger inventory was liquidated but several developers at Starpath moved to Epyx including Sweat! programmer Scott Nelson. Work was started on a new decathlon game for the Commodore 64 named Summer Games. Scott Nelson worked on it and Summer Games II.

Reception

Epyx sold more than 250,000 copies of Summer Games by November 1989; Ahoy! described it as "tremendously successful". As the first of Epyx's "Games" series, it founded what a historian later described as "the most sustainedly popular in the long life of the Commodore 64", the most popular home computer of the mid-1980s.

In 1996, Next Generation listed the "Games" series collectively as number 89 on its "Top 100 Games of All Time". The magazine wrote that though the games had great graphics for their time, their most defining qualities were their competitive multiplayer modes and "level of control that has yet to be equaled". In a retrospective review, Atari 7800 Forever gave only a 2.0 out of 5, criticizing the boring events.

See also

  • The Activision Decathlon (1983)
  • Track & Field (1983)
  • Daley Thompson's Decathlon (1984)

References

  • Summer Games at MobyGames
  • Interview with Scott Nelson from The Epyx Shrine (by Cybergoth)
  • Images of Summer Games box, manual and screen shots