“Take on the world” – London 2012

Back in the 1980s, Super Chart Island’s identity as a specifically British project was obvious in more entries than not: a succession of local games, often played on the British ZX Spectrum. In the ‘90s the global big names moved in, but a remarkable number of the biggest successes started off in the UK, and our idiosyncratic tastes showed through in other ways. By the time we get to 2012, you have to look a lot harder to find much specifically British in the list of #1 games. The increasingly online world, within games and outside of them, made the world smaller. The expense of game development encouraged further consolidation and barriers to entry. With the Xbox 360 as the leading console just like in North America, our lists of most popular games overlapped heavily.

Out of the ten different games to top the monthly sales charts in the US during 2012, as many as four of them were not ever #1 in the UK. However, three of those were American Football or Basketball games (the exception being hack’n’slash Darksiders II). Rather than anything particular to British video game tastes, it was larger national cultural factors which directly got us buying FIFA in massive numbers instead of Madden. This was also clearly the reasoning behind a big hit of the summer which spent three weeks at #1 here but never appeared on an American top 10. London 2012 was about our sports event!

London 2012 the game has a well-considered choice of events designed for short playthroughs, and the nice idea of setting up a calendar where you pick from two events for each day. You then swap between the two, doing the heats before the finals. This setup goes some way further than previous games to make it feel like there are really multiple sports going on at the same time. It is therefore closer to the experience of an Olympics, or at least watching it on TV. It still falls well short of that, though. The gap in quantity remains so big that the token nature of the effort is obvious.

The events themselves have some nicely chosen angles and atmospheric details, but the state of the art had not moved on much from Athens 2004, meaning ultimately not that far from Daley Thompson in 1984. So London was its unique selling point. I have lived in London since just before it was awarded the Olympics. I went to three different events in 2012, and enjoyed the atmosphere of the city, helped by the lack of the predicted traffic apocalypse. None of the sports I watched (wrestling, badminton, football) appears in London 2012 the video game, but I bought it regardless. The continuity was even a good thing, perhaps, after a childhood playing The Games Summer Edition and Going for Gold on the C64. Here is an interactive rendition of archery where you line up a circle and correct for wind speed. This felt right and proper.

The game makes sure to add London to that. Its renditions of some of the venues, especially the main stadium and Horse Guards Parade, do a good job of putting them in a recognisable context. Although the fact that the game came out before the Games inevitable causes accuracy issues like having completely the wrong torch, and the venues going significantly less heavy on new rave pink than in reality. Besides the backdrops, most of the individual details of how a city hosts the games are not shown in advance, or aren’t in the stuff visible on TV at all. It’s not too difficult to make a version of the games that leaves them all out. For all of the memories of the opening ceremony, it was a big international commercial event that just happened to be based in our city.

As such it makes sense that there wasn’t a British developer for London 2012. Instead, it fitted the story of the times. Athens 2004 had been made by British company Eurocom for Sony. Beijing 2008 was Eurocom again, but for Sega. London 2012 was published by Sega but this time developed by their Sega Studios Australia in Brisbane. This had formerly been nominally part of Creative Assembly, the British company behind Empire: Total War, after Creative Assembly were bought by Sega but not yet totally integrated. That was a typical kind of destination for a British developer. So was the final one, less than a year later, when Sega announced that it would shut Sega Studios Australia down.