When writing about Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge back in ‘88, I said the following:
“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.”
Could quadrennial become biennial? For 1994, the Winter Olympics switched from being the same year as the summer edition to occurring midway through its four-year cycle, gaining more space to itself. Here was another opportunity for related video game collections. US Gold – they of the previously dodgy approach to the football World Cup licence – went to more of an effort to create a playable tie-in that reflected Lillehammer ‘94. Alongside watching the bronze-winning return of Torvill and Dean on TV, enough Brits went and bought the game to make it the best-selling in the country.
If you’re keeping up with where I am up to in Super Chart Island, or rather when I am up to, you will have spotted the deliberate mistake there. Winter Olympics was a #1 game, but in 1995, more than a year after the Olympics had finished and the game was released. This is weird. Most of the #1 games I’m covering top the charts when they are newer even when they aren’t tied to specific outside events. The British Library’s haphazard holding of back issues of Computer Trade Weekly is far more complete for 1995 than any other year until 2000, so I have a weekly picture of what was happening, but this is one of the times it provides more questions than answers. No other game based on the Winter Olympics has made it to #1, but Winter Olympics spent several weeks at the top of the console chart in April 1995, and the reason is a mystery.
With the downhill skiing season finishing the previous month, and presumably the BBC’s 1995 series of Ski Sunday along with it, there would likely have been no winter sports on TV at the time. The weather for the month was ‘very dry, sunny and mild’ which doesn’t sound like a contributing factor. The lack of specific answers turns me to more general ones. Alongside the charts, those issues of Computer Trade Weekly provided occasional commentary that, while console games made up half the games market, the console chart was slow as sales were spread out and there were few big new releases. On that basis my best guess for the Winter Olympics phenomenon is a prosaic one that it just got a particularly sharp discount at Future Zone or something.
Whatever their reasons for buying Winter Olympics, what did its players get? A lot of details specific to the Olympics, for one thing. The Viking children that were the official mascots for the games are everyone in the menus, which is no bad thing, and if you want to know what the exact venues were for events it will fill you in too. Without a star like Daley Thompson to front things up (figure skating, the biggest draw for Britsh fans, isn’t even in the game), the place and event have to star.
Alongside that, it’s more of a celebration and less of a challenge. You can play through a complete Olympics of the ten events on offer, and the worst that will happen if you crash and spectacularly faceplant in all of them is that you will watch your country stay stuck to the bottom of the medal table. You still get to play them all. Individual events tend towards being simple in terms of controls and more complex in terms of what you do with them, which is a pretty good design philosophy. Bobsleigh and luge have a bit of button mashing for the run up, for old time’s sake, but after that you are just steering left and right. In the various downhill skiing events, you’re doing the directions alone. That’s more than half of the events covered. The progression comes from the challenge of just trying to make your way to the end of the tricky courses, and then trying to build in time gains on top of that. It’s not easy, but it’s easy to get into and have fun with.
What it’s missing, perhaps, is a bit more personality. Everything feels a little too functional, too in keeping with being an Official Licenced Product. Despite the extra technological power at its disposal, there are fewer moments of beauty than the pixels of Winter Games provided a decade earlier. Not for the last time, it’s a decent game that relies on enthusiasm for the associated event to bring it up to an extra level. And enthusiasm can’t have been that high among all those only buying it a year later.
Gallup cartridge chart, Computer Trade Weekly 10 April 1995 (chart for week to 1 April 1995)