Daley Thompson’s Decathlon and Super Test were #1 a year apart from each other back in the early days of Super Chart Island in 1984 and 1985. Then, a gap. After an initial rush, sports minigame collections were not to prove a perennial fixture of the top of the charts. Quadrennial, though? That’s another matter. The Olympics and the large proportion of the country watching a collection of different short bits of sports coverage, feeling inspired to do vaguely related things, is an unmissable opportunity. And so, Daley Thompson was back, to considerably more success in the computer game arena than the actual Olympics, where he followed up his golds from 1980 and 1984 with a fourth place.
An Olympiad on from the Decathlon game, and with Thompson’s event back in the spotlight, Ocean took the decision to make the game about the decathlon again. Very much the same game about the Decathlon. Olympic Challenge is essentially Super Chart Island’s first remake of many. The further on we get, the more we’re going to see the same games come around again with some fancier graphics and a couple of extra features. Olympic Challenge adds proper tracking of your decathlon points across all the events, which is nice, but not a change worth a whole new game.
Most of the fancier graphics in the gifs with this post come from the fact I’m playing the Amstrad CPC version (thanks Alan Sugar) but the Spectrum one looks different too. The previously generic athlete is replaced with an undeniable attempt at rendering Daley Thompson himself, moustache and all. If the events don’t make that plain enough, the extra training session beforehand gives you a big clear view of him lifting weights and doing push-ups.
The training is an odd addition. It sets up how well you can do in the decathlon, so it takes on some importance. All three activities you have to do in it, though, consist of nothing more than waggling the joystick from side to side as many times as you can in a minute. I complained about the original Decathlon feeling like a training session, but this really is just a chore. So what is the point?
Well, the big view of Daley is one thing, a fine bit of personal branding. And branding is the wider key. Your success meter is a bottle of Lucozade which fills up (Lucozade is a registered trademark of Beecham Group PLC., every interstitial screen in the game reminds you in flashy text). The game is a commercial opportunity and a reflection of commercial reality in what it’s depicting. When you go onto the 100m and everything else, you get asked to select the correct Adidas trainer for each event.
And the thing is how I reacted to the realisation that Daley Thompson Olympic Challenge is a four-year-old game merely updated with the latest commercial endorsements. Not with horror, but with a wry and detached sense of recognition. The gameplay may already be ancient and decaying, but this game is nonetheless the future.
