“Mediocre display” – Athens 2004

I’ve talked previously about 2004’s status as a year of sequels, when all the most successful games were built on established franchises. None were more established than this one: a video game based on an edition of the Olympics consciously harking back to the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, itself based on events held the best part of 3,000 years earlier. James Bond and football’s European Championships had nothing on that. The funny thing is that the video game feels ancient in a way that the 2004 Olympics themselves didn’t.

It was just four posts into this blog that I covered Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, released in 1984, the year of the Los Angeles Olympics and in the relatively early days of mass market home computer games. Taking after Konami’s Hyper Olympic/Track & Field, and, before that, Microsoft’s Decathlon (1980), Daley Thompson’s Decathlon used rapidly alternating control inputs as a way of simulating running, with just barely enough additional complications to simulate the ten events of the decathlon. My biggest problem with it was not the deadening repetition, but the absence of atmosphere and structure that made it feel like a training event at most.

In twenty years, much had changed in the world of video games. We had gone from the few colours and necessary simplicity of the Spectrum’s visuals and sounds to the detailed 3D capabilities of the PlayStation 2. Athens 2004 could have commentary from Stuart Storey, voice of some of the BBC’s coverage of the real thing. And in deeper gameplay terms, the wider picture of the most popular sports games had changed a lot too. Championship Manager and Pro Evolution Soccer offered sophisticated recreations of their sport, FIFA offered an experience tailored to match to sport on TV as closely as possible, Tiger Woods PGA Tour offered customisation and carefully calibrated emotion.

To look at Athens 2004, though, you would think nothing of substance had changed in twenty years. The vast majority of its events are controlled by the rapid mashing of alternate buttons, XOXOXO, a call right back to Hyper Olympic and even less comfortable than the joystick waggling I grew up with. Swimming events add the pressing of third button when a message comes up on screen to breathe, exactly like in Hyper Sports in 1985. It occasionally gets more varied, like the (dance mat compatible) Dance Dance Revolution approach for some gymnastics events, but even others like weightlifting (mash buttons to keep a power bar above a certain level) and archery (line up your sights, compensate for the wind) feel straight from the ‘80s.

And beyond the form of the gameplay, there is a striking lack of personality or sense of event. It’s the same problem again, but without early microcomputer technology as an excuse. The only thing that really marks out the game as the Athens Olympics is the official wobbly cartoons used on the menu screen to illustrate which sport you have chosen. You line up with your nameless athlete against a set of nameless athletes from other countries, every person with an identical build. If you choose the right game mode you get a cursory medal ceremony afterwards; by default you don’t even get that, just a list of results. 

There is little attention to detail in general. During the javelin competition, my athlete celebrated wildly as measurements came up for throws well short of her best. The anonymity and lack of care and attention turns more sinister on realising that Athens 2004 presents a British athletics track team with not a single Black person in it, not something that has ever been the case in my lifetime. This for an Olympics in which Kelly Holmes won two gold medals for Britain, and both of her events are included in the game. I can appreciate the difficulty of licensing real athletes, but it wouldn’t have been hard to be better than this. More broadly, it feels bizarre to sell people a game as a souvenir for an event that removed almost any trace of the event.

It feels even more odd because, for all that the issues are familiar from the ‘80s, other games had cracked it before that decade was up. I don’t remember the Seoul Olympics of 1988, but I have a fond regard for them entirely generated by Epyx’s The Games: Summer Edition for the Commodore 64, part of a series of multi-sport games which inventively moved things on from joystick waggling. That game’s beautiful intro and outro with their series of overlapping stills of the opening and closing ceremonies, and its medal ceremony with SID renditions of national anthems, gave a feeling of place and importance that Athens 2004 gets nowhere near. Epyx were able to extend their series to the Winter Olympics, and beyond to California Games and its BMX, skateboarding and surfing events (all of which are now Olympic sports!).

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The days of spin-off multi-sports games like California Games being able to command the kind of audiences that Epyx’s had had passed. And there was a structural difference between Athens 2004 and the other popular sports games of the ‘00s, Pro Evolution Soccer and PGA Tour, which can explain why it didn’t take their route either. Those series were based on a yearly release model, with their improvements designed to keep coming back to them (and not rival options). There’s no way to turn a game of the Olympics into a yearly thing, though. The Olympics remained a golden opportunity every four years for a game to capitalise on people taking an interest in sports they might not normally (with the chart exaggerating interest because the Olympics fall during a quiet time of the year for games release schedules). But it was not more than that.

At a time of increasingly rapid sequel schedules, there was little incentive to make an Olympics game any better than adequate when the future prospects for it were so low. If it couldn’t have a sequel for four years, what was the point? That’s the message of 2004’s #1s, and the context that explains Athens 2004 and how it ended up being developed by Eurocom, with a long history of ports and undistinguished licensed games to their name. The whole model for an Olympics game, for sports games in general, would need to be revolutionised before there was much incentive to make one any better. Funnily enough, that’s exactly what we would get by 2008, but for now in 2004 we were left with a tired shrug of a game.

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Top of the charts for week ending 28 August 2004:

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