The Wii’s initial success was powered by motion-controlled sports with a smattering of more traditional Nintendo pursuits, including inevitably more than one Mario game (Super Mario Galaxy was released too far into the year-end peak rush to top the charts, but important nonetheless). What could be a more obvious next stage than combining the two for a game where Mario characters play various sports? A multi-sport Mario game would surely have been big. Nintendo didn’t stop there, though.
I’ve written enough times already about how slow Nintendo were off the mark in the UK, but just about everyone here knew Mario. And the same went for his definitive rival, the Senna to his Prost, the (blue) Blur to his Oasis: Sonic the Hedgehog. Nintendo v Sega was far from the battle here, but it was still a familiar one. Whatever the current state of Sega and their mascot, they and Nintendo coming to an agreement to see the two characters in the same game was a winning concept with an air of the historically surreal. Nintendo and Sega divvied up publishing for different territories, with Sega getting the rights here. That was probably fitting; while Sonic was no longer exactly at his best, the Mega Drive’s status as the first console to really take off in the UK, the existence of Sonic the Comic and all, meant that for the UK nostalgia stakes he was in many ways the heavier hitting of the two. So, a multi-sport Mario & Sonic game would surely have been very big. Sega and Nintendo didn’t stop there, though.
As Athens 2004 showed, the Olympics remained a big draw for people playing video games, even when rendered in a less-than-exciting way. It had been a stalwart topic going back nearly as far as some of the other games concepts Nintendo had been quick to adapt for Wii Play. So the final step in this all-powerful display of branding synergy was to make not just a multi-sport event with Mario & Sonic, but the multi-sport event with Mario & Sonic. The pile-up of intellectual property looks positively prophetic from the vantage point of the present day madness of multiverses. The commercial result was a game which spent seven weeks at the top of the UK combined formats chart, failing to return during the 2008 Olympic Games themselves in part because so many people already had a copy.
Somewhere amid that marketing tornado, there was a game, too. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games takes on a fairly familiar selection of video game Olympic disciplines – athletics, swimming, archery, with the slight novelty of rowing, fencing and trampoline there too. There’s always a tiny bit of disappointment in me when a game doesn’t attempt to recreate 28 different sports, but there we are. Sports’ treatment in-game is sometimes even more familiar, with the swimming’s prompts to press a button at breathing intervals straight out of Hyper Sports (and Athens 2004). Different events involve a lot of alternating inputs to build up speed and then making another input at the right time, a model unchanged since Daley Thompson’s Decathlon and beyond.
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games does freshen things up a bit beyond marketing. Most importantly, there’s the same factor at play as in the Wii versions of Tiger Woods PGA Tour: motion controls fundamentally change the experience. Not so much in waggling the wiimote and nunchuck as an alternative to waggling a joystick (though that does solve the ever-present ‘80s risk of snapping a stick off its stand). It’s more the difference in something like long jump, where the jump is determined not just by timing but by the strength of a swing of the remote, an analogue physical action that gives a much greater sense of applying technique and physicality than previous alternatives.
The shooting and archery both similarly use some old ideas but make excellent use of the possibilities of the remote-as-pointer and enliven them. The archery’s dual-wielding of nunchuck and remote in an attempt to line up a crosshair from each is particularly inspired, bearing no resemblance to the real thing but producing a technical challenge which feels somehow appropriate. When things go wrong they go very wrong indeed (the demands of hammer throw are incomprehensible; the table tennis expects you to swing several days before the ball arrives and feels awful) but when they go right it’s something strong and new.
Alongside the power of waggle, there’s also the fact, that, you know, this is Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. You are not controlling a vague athlete stand-in, but an assortment of cartoon people and anthropomorphic animals, and there is no small additional joy in that. Something about the blasé disregard for considerations of gender hits a bit different in 2022 too, even if man and woman and echidna lining up together and competing against a single record standard is probably driven primarily by simplicity. The game does a good job of enhancing the characters’ impact further with a balance of playing their presence straight and adding flourishes like flames coming out from fast runners and glitter effects around particularly good throws. These sit alongside the large control prompts which frequently pop up and are a welcoming addition. Alongside Mario, Sonic and their various friends you can also use your Miis, though they tend to make for one clashing aesthetic too many and when rowing look like someone wearing an ill-fitting human suit.
I say one more clashing aesthetic because there is already a basic problem posed by the concept. It’s not just Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, but Mario & Sonic at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Released the best part of a year in advance, there isn’t much of the actual Olympics that it can draw on, besides the recognisable lattice of the Birds Nest stadium and some big things with images of the mascots on. There were presumably requirements to stick to certain elements of reality, though.
The game’s series of little championships are structured like Mario Kart, and a handful of even more Mario Kart events are there to unlock, but it’s just one flavour among many. And where the game generally has Mushroom Kingdom and Sonic-related flags on display, when the trampoline venue has a bunch of flags of real-world countries hanging, it’s a discordant note. Mario & Sonic at the Olympics could have been done a bit better. It certainly could have been done worse. But ultimately the realities of assembling its line-up meant that the space of possibility was severely limited before it even left the starting line.
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games spent a total of eight weeks at the top of at the UK chart in one form or another. Details of what else was at the top of charts at the time after the page break.