As we're just about on the eve of completely ignoring the start of the 2008 Summer games in Peking*, China I thought now would be a good time to talk about one of my favorite games from the 80's



If you had a game console or computer during the 80's there's a good chance you had this game although hopefully your copy wasn't as pirated as my copy.

I don't have the specifics but I'm pretty sure Epyx ported this big ass cash cow to every platform on the sunny side of the iron curtain. Maybe they had track and field video games in Russia but since they boycotted the '84 Olympics, who gives a fuck?

Anyway, the game featured various Summer Olympic standards such as Pole Vaulting, Diving, Sprinting, Swimming, Gymnastics, and Skeet Shooting. It was one of the few games that my sister would actually sit down and play against me because it had gymnastics as an event. Back then she was in 2nd grade and I was in 4th and like 2nd grade girls everywhere she had been mesmerized by Mary Lou Retton and her gigantic oak-like thighs. Obviously nobody told America's youth that the Soviet Union would have dominated that shit had they not boycotted but I digress.



Most of the events involved waggling the joystick back and forth as fast as humanly possible and maybe pushing a button at the right time or pushing up or down on the stick. This game broke so many joysticks at my house that my parents started locking them in the desk when we started to get too crazy on that shit. I guess you could say that it sometimes replaced exercise when the weather was too cold for us to be cruelly forced outside away from the glow of the monitor.



Anyway, as I said before, my little sister loved this game. Unfortunately for her the skills gap between a 2nd grader and a 4th grader are immense and she was mercilessly defeated by my summer Olympians on every occasion. The Gymnastics event was a particular sore spot for her. Often she would anxiously await the event with its music from the nutcracker suite and sensible-haired female gymnast performing a vague side-scrolling floor exercise. Me, being the young man of the house just wanted to win at all costs. That being said, I found a bug to exploit.

The C64 version of the game had a bug which let you get a perfect 6.0 score at gymnastics if you purposely made your character fall down over and over and over until the routine ended. My sister would put actual thought into her routine, muddling through the awful C64 controls, lucky if she got her gymnast to perform 3 or 4 moves without falling. Meanwhile I would just fall down 20 times and a perfect score, laughing the whole time. I suppose I was kind of a dick in that respect as many of our Summer Games ended in hysterical, tear-filled pouts of
"you're supposed to do gymnastics moves"

Oh well, sometimes I let her win but I would turn off the power before the gold medal ceremony (resulting in more tears.) Video gaming can be so cruel.


*YEAH. I KNOW.