EPYX Summer Games was probably brought out around the time of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles – who knows, as a way of engendering pride and patriotism in computer playing kids? Just getting parents to fork out more for games like always, unless you had an 'insider'? Did it make us want to take up sports? No way – mostly I would run the game from original floppy disk (about 15cm x 15cm) when I wanted to do belly flops in the high dive, or curl up into a tight ball and still get 2.
0 from some kooky nation I'd never heard of (remembering I was about 7 or 8 years old, so how was I supposed to know the abbreviations for every small African country?).
Note that it was impossible to do a 'Greg Louganis' on the high dive, as much as we tried in later years (ie. after the 1988 Olympics)! It wavered between hours seeking perfection and very sore eyes/shoulders, and total abandon at wanting to do the stupidest things possible in every event. There was a Summer Games II as well, with which I may get confused on some of the included sports. Gymnastics was great though hard to achieve consistency in all the events, while cycling just beat me because
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I was always the slowest. I just couldn't get the sequence right on the 'circle' motion of the joystick (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW). If you thought of it like that, you were doomed to be static and barely able to move forward! In the track and field, I spent many hours cumulatively getting the timing right on bringing down the pole for pole vault, and running was much harder than just pushing the joy stick to the right (lots of very fast side to side action – maybe that's why my sister has such weak wrists now!).
To their great credit, they included racial diversity which was not always thought of in the 1980s, though some of the skin colours were quite abnormal with the programming limitations. I think I 'mastered' the skeet shooting the best out of all of the games. I loved when you got a high or perfect score, or set a new record, and the crowd would cheer even louder than normal. It really did a fantastic job of making you feel like you were kind of participating after you watched the Olympics themselves (through a child's eyes, anyway).
But did it result in great sports-people today? No, they were out already starting their careers while we sat inside and enjoyed the comfort of the blue screen.
