Sunday, August 24, 2008

Ten Ways: Epyx’s Summer Games

The late, lamented video game developer Epyx holds a special place in history, it not only managed to use two ‘extreme’ consonants to replace one vowel sound in the pre-l33t days of 1983, but also put out one of the most sophisticated and varied sports games in the post Atari-crash era: Summer Games.


First on the Commodore 64 in 1984, Summer Games let players compete in such events as the Pole Vault, Platform Diving, Sprinting, Gymnastics, Freestyle Swimming, Skeet Shooting and Rowing at the “Epyx Games.” (Either they couldn’t afford the official license, or they just didn’t want to confuse people by calling it the “Summer Olympyx”)

An odd combination of sports, but basically all the individual events (and in the case of running and swimming, one-at-a-time relays) whose motions can be replicated using the most ubiquitous controller of the era, the single button Atari Joystick.

Being a digital signal device, there was no room for the nuance that can be found with the modern analog sticks, so trying to make your tiny gymnast avatar land on her feet after tumbling though the air was a little like playing the piano with your face.

The game came packed onto a storage medium that considered massive now only in terms of its physical size. A single five and a quarter inch floppy disk, like the one found in the box for Summer Games, at its peak could hold up to 360 Kilobytes. To put it in perspective, you could fit about 11,650 copies of Summer Games onto the first-gen, 4GB iPhone.

Very popular, Summer Games would be ported forward until finally it arrived on the Sega Master system at the start of the 8-bit era. Epyx, would also find success spinning-off the franchise with Winter Games, World Games (Caber Toss! YES!) as well as California Games, which made an appearance on the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console in Europe this past April.

Sadly, Epyx folded slowly in the late eighties and early nineties, until finally selling the bulk of it’s assets to Atari, including their work on an early handheld system, one that would become the Atari Lynx. Epyx is gyne, but not forgytton…x.

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