So far in 2026, out of sixteen games released this year which have reached #1 in UK sales charts, five have been some form of remake, remaster or repackage, from Star Fox to Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2. The games of the ‘90s and ‘00s are a regular source of material for new releases, with marketing strategies combining nostalgia and long-established approaches to promoting technological advances and technically improved graphics. While remakes may have become more frequent in recent times, though, they were already around even when computer games as a widely experienced artform were in their infancy.

Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, with its tie-in to Britain’s twice Olympic gold winning decathlete, was a huge hit for Ocean in 1984. They gave it a sequel the following year, Daley Thompson’s Supertest. In a crowded field, including their own conversion of Konami’s Hyper Sports, Supertest didn’t take off in quite the same way. After that, Ocean came to exactly the same decision as Konami did with Hyper Olympic — give the series a rest for a few years until the timing was right for its return. And that, of course, meant the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.

  • Konami ’88 (Konami, 1988, Arcade)
  • Konami ’88 (Konami, 1988, Arcade)

In making Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge in 1988, Ocean didn’t directly copy its Konami counterpart, Konami ‘88, in the same way as in 1984. They didn’t need to, because they had already established how to make an Olympic decathlon game. The task was just to make Daley Thompson’s Decathlon again, but with upgraded graphics and a few new features. There were now more advanced computers available, but the biggest sales were always likely to come from the same ones as last time: the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum. The 128k Spectrum now at least offered improved memory and musical capabilities, but enough players still had 48k machines that Ocean couldn’t afford to make the game 128k only.

Still, techniques and knowledge had improved enough since Daley Thompson’s Decathlon that Ocean were well able to improve on its appearance. For the Commodore 64 version, Dave Collier, who had worked on the original game, shared programming duties with 17-year-old Richard Palmer, who had just joined Ocean. In doing so he followed his older brother John, who ended up taking on Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge’s C64 graphics. The originally assigned artist, Haydn Dalton, had become “pissed off at the working conditions in the dungeon of Ocean” and left for Binary Designs.

  • Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, Commodore 64)
  • Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, Commodore 64)

The equivalent roles for the Spectrum version were both taken by newcomers, with Dave Thompson programming and Bill Harbison on graphics. Talking to Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean for their history of Ocean, Harbison explained that he had initially rejected his friends’ suggestion to apply for Ocean “because I thought the company was rubbish”. This opinion was informed by the same outsourced Knight Rider game that had been central to inspiring Ocean’s push to take on more in-house developers. After some rejections from other companies, Harbison reconsidered and successfully applied. Ocean colleague Paul Hughes later described him as “a hoot” and both “a very talented pixel artist” and a “brilliant caricature artist and creator of the Ocean Naff Mag”, whatever that was.

Harbison’s tasks for making Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge started with Daley Thompson himself. “It was important to me to make Daley black”, he recalled, as opposed to the unrecognisable white sprite in Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. That meant improving the Daley Thompson you control in the decathlon events, but there was also a chance to present a better likeness still in the game’s most significant addition. Training was crucial to Daley Thompson (he reportedly once said that he always trained twice on Christmas Day to outdo his rivals) and before starting the decathlon you can complete a training programme, waggling your joystick faster to make Thompson carry out more curls, sit-ups and squats.

  • Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
  • Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, ZX Spectrum)

For the training sections, as well as Bill Harbison doing his best to make a recognisable Daley Thompson to take up much of the screen, he put his caricature skills to good use. He added a little bald man in the background, based on a friend of his called Colin, who comedically fails to pick up weights. He initially did this to amuse himself, but development head Gary Bracey liked it enough for it to stay in. The exact mechanics of the training section give pointers to another reason Ocean included it. As you complete the exercises, a bottle of Lucozade gets filled up. As reviews and the instructions explained, the more this is filled the more it aids your powers.

As I’ve written many times, Ocean’s vision for putting together different licences (and unlicensed inspirations) was a repeated theme throughout their years on the charts. A Crash preview for Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge reported Gary Bracey saying that a licensed game was almost a guaranteed success: “you only have to look at Out Run to see what I mean… it never got the great reviews but it sold very well”. One new attraction of 1988’s Daley Thompson return was that Ocean could put the word ‘Olympic’ in the title this time, but they didn’t stop there. Back in their early days in 1983, Ocean had made a sponsored Burger Time clone called Mr. Wimpy, and Daley Thompson’s own sponsorships and endorsements gave a chance to return to that well. 

Adverts with Daley Thompson had helped to raise Lucozade’s popularity as a sports drink, and all involved could now build on that further. “Lucozade is a registered trademark of Beecham Group PLC”, various screens in Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge remind you. Each of the decathlon’s events also starts with the task of selecting the right Adidas footwear to improve your performance. Getting a success message is just a matter of writing down the right answer to re-use once you’ve found it out, like the submarine recognition check from Silent Service without even the copy-protection purpose. But it does put Adidas’s name and products in front of you, for which Ocean presumably got paid. 

  • Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
  • Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, Amiga)

Many reviews of the game came replete with early mentions of Lucozade, though I get the sense that as well as its presence in the game, this was partly just because it had been most people’s recent exposure to Daley Thompson. Reviewers were also mostly quite aligned on the merits of the game, and how exhausting it was thanks to its familiar rapid left-right control scheme. “Rather than coordination or timing the key to this game is sheer brute force and endurance” wrote Crash, while Matthew Evans in Zzap! warned of “the most exhausting joystick waggling game I’ve ever played” and the potential for players to suffer “Serious Arm Lock-Up”.

Bob Wade in ACE wrote that the Commodore 64 version’s training sessions “aren’t as sadistic as the Amiga version” and concluded that “waggling games aren’t exactly new, but this one is nicely put together. It’s certainly better than the original DT’s Decathlon”. Matt Bielby in Computer & Video Games described some of the training stage flourishes as “totally unnecessary to the game but they are a nice touch”, before concluding that Daley Thompson’s Decathlon was unlikely to be an award winner like its predecessor because “we’ve just seen too much of this sort of thing since then”. 

  • Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
  • Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, ZX Spectrum)

Others zoomed in further on the game’s exact nature. “Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge is a very old-fashioned game” wrote The Games Machine. “It is, in fact, merely a souped-up version of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon.” Likewise Tony Dillon in Sinclair User: “under the enhanced graphics and nice visual techniques, it’s still DTD hiding under there”. He continued with a lament that sounds all too relevant nearly forty years later: “I do think it’s a shame really that a megabuck company like Ocean can’t come up with new ideas instead of lugging old horses around”.

Daley Thompson’s Olympic Remake, as it could have been called, proved less successful than its predecessor. That may, however, have been as much down to the fortunes of the man himself as to reducing appetite for the style of game. At the Seoul Olympics, an injury-affected Daley Thompson narrowly missed out on a medal altogether. As Mike Pattenden wrote in Commodore User when reviewing the later Amiga version (a rush job, according to programmer Peter Johnson): “Ocean must be more gutted about Daley’s demise than most: had he succeeded DTOC would probably have fared much better chartwise than it has”.

  • Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, Amiga)
  • Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, Amiga)

There is another post-script on the theme of living up to expectations. The biggest new additions to the game, the training sessions to boost your Lucozade power and the Adidas shoe selection? For the Spectrum version at minimum, the supposed power-boosts did absolutely nothing. Bill Harbison recently revealed as much, saying that “we never actually told Gary [Bracey]”, and none of the game’s reviewers noticed. So, the recap, way back in 1988, Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge hit #1 as a remake whose advances were cosmetic at best, and mainly in the service of additional commercial considerations. Plus ça change.

Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 08 October 1988, Computer & Video Games

Top of the charts for week ending 08 October 1988

UK games: Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, Various)

Japan games: Konamic Sports in Seoul (Konami, Famicom)

UK films: Good Morning Vietnam

UK singles: Whitney Houston – One Moment in Time

UK albums: Chris de Burgh – Flying Colours

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