After the success of Epyx’s Winter Games, a UK #1 in 1985, there was a lot of interest here in what they would follow it up with. Following Summer Games and Summer Games II, Winter Games had been the third in a series of increasingly successful compilations of sports mini-games that were essentially off-brand Olympics games. When Dan Gutman interviewed Epyx’s Bob Botch and Matt Householder in America for Commodore User’s February 1986 issue, he asked what was on the way. Botch didn’t answer, but said that they would “have something that will be as well received as Summer and Winter Games were, and I think it will be even better received in England.“ Gutman threw out some suggestions and, by chance or tip-off, got it right third time: “Spring Games? Fall Games? World Games?”

It was Botch’s idea to get away from the constraints of the Olympics by branching out into less recognised sports from around the world. Winter Games, which Epyx had largely contracted out to Action Graphics, had helpfully set a precedent through its “hotdog” stunt skiing event, decades ahead of Olympic inclusion. Householder managed the project and contributed the idea that it should be “a very special travelogue” that informed you about each country. Chuck Sommerville and Kevin Furry, describing Epyx’s general approach for the Games series to Retro Gamer, described a brainstorm process where they would look at “what could be done with existing hardware, what could be interesting, and what would be fun”. 

  • World Games (Epyx, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • World Games (Epyx, 1986, Commodore 64)

Somerville, who had worked on Winter Games but sat out World Games, described working on the games as something that could feel “like a production line”. Each game would follow “a predictable set of problems”, with individual mini-games isolated and simple data structures passed between them. World Games was once again contracted out in part, to K-Byte, and had a larger credited team than its predecessors. That included Jay Braman, Matt Decker, Brent Degraaf, Chris Desterling, Douglas D. Dragin, Bob Macdowell, Joe Simko and Jeff Webb on programming, and Steve Mage on music and programming. On graphics they had Courtney Granner, Susan Greene, Michael Kosaka and Jenny Martin, with Kosaka presumably juggling that with work on Super Cycle.

For World Games, the brainstorming process included starting by thinking of a country and what sport you might do there. They finished up with eight different events, effectively two more than Winter Games. It included weightlifting for the Soviet Union, log rolling for Canada, sumo for Japan and barrel jumping for Germany. Bob Botch’s comment about World Games being popular in England was presumably based on its inclusion of a recognisably British event, if very much not an English one: the caber toss. Botch would prove correct, which was a good job for Epyx as UK publisher U.S. Gold’s releases provided them a headache since their cassette versions did not have the same copy protection as Epyx’s original disk versions.

  • World Games (Epyx, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • World Games (Epyx, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • World Games (Epyx, 1986, Commodore 64)

World Games and its succession of odd events with ingenious control schemes did everything its predecessors did well and branched out happily in a way that allowed for even more personality. It got a lot of glowing reviews. Ferdy Hamilton in Commodore User called it graphically remarkable (“how many games do you know where the man depicted on the screen has a plethora of facial expressions?“) and suggested that the sumo wrestling “would have made a worthy full price game for most companies”. Tim Metcalfe in Computer & Video Games described the log rolling as “something out of It’s a Knockout”, highlighted the “humorous graphic frills” of each event, and called World Games “well worth a place in anyone’s Christmas stocking”.

  • World Games (Epyx, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • World Games (Epyx, 1986, Commodore 64)

Others went further still. “How could any software house continue to refine and improve an idea which seemed so close to perfection? With World Games, Epyx has answered everyone in the most impressive way by producing the goods” wrote Francis Jago in Your Computer. Gary Penn in Zzap! 64 called it no less than “the most enjoyable game I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing”. World Games went to the top of the UK charts for two weeks in November 1986, at a time when to do so with just a Commodore 64 release was becoming rarer as more games were released on multiple formats simultaneously.

Both the Zzap! 64 and Commodore User reviews mentioned looking forward to Winter Games II. That would not turn out to be Epyx’s next Games game. This might have been something to do with waiting to line things up for the Olympic year 1988, but it might also have been that World Games was so popular they decided to do something more in the same spirit. That’s what they did, except, rather than looking out to the world, this time, at the suggestion of Matt Householder, they looked rather closer to their own San Francisco base. The result was California Games.

  • California Games (Epyx, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • California Games (Epyx, 1987, Commodore 64)

This meant another quite different set of sports, including ones which would make the Olympics decades later like skateboarding, BMX biking and surfing. Plus some which still haven’t got there yet, like hacky-sack. Although the atmosphere and look of the game was once again different, they took the same approach to how the player would interact with it. As Furry told Retro Gamer, “Everything we did was an attempt to bring the player into the game with a realistic control method.” “Chuck and I would constantly try each other’s interfaces and I remember Chuck once completely dismissed his design because we agreed it just didn’t feel right”. 

California Games was another commercial hit (reaching #7 on the UK combined formats chart in November 1987) and a hit with British critics. Julian Rignall and Steve Jarratt in Zzap! 64 declared that Epyx had “exceeded both themselves and the limitations of the C64” for “quite simply the apex of computer sports gaming”. “California Games deserves all the accolades and trophies it’s likely to get this year”, wrote Computer & Video Games. Ferdy Hamilton in Commodore User called it the best in the series, saying “the graphics are a new first not just for Epyx but for the 64” and that “the greatest virtue of the game is its ease of use and playability”. A subheading in the review used a spin on The Beach Boys: “I wish they all could be California games”.

  • California Games (Epyx, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • California Games (Epyx, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • California Games (Epyx, 1987, Commodore 64)

After that it was 1988, four years since the original Summer Games, and Epyx found a way to outdo their first phase: pick up some actual Olympic licences. In those days the summer and winter Olympics were in the same year, so they did two games. The presentation on the resultant The Games: Summer Edition and The Games: Winter Edition is another jump up still – as a child I absolutely loved the summer one and its sequences with music and a series of stills depicting the opening and closing of the Seoul Olympics. These were, however, a little less successful.

  • The Games: Winter Edition (Epyx, 1988, Commodore 64)
  • The Games: Winter Edition (Epyx, 1988, Commodore 64)
  • The Games: Summer Edition (Epyx, 1988, Commodore 64)
  • The Games: Summer Edition (Epyx, 1988, Commodore 64)

I’ve seen commentators say that the official status was a bad fit for the kind of irreverent take on sports Epyx were known for. The Games: Summer Edition still has things like move names with “splat” in for your failures in uneven bars, or the hammer-throwing flying off into the distance with their hammer if you don’t release in time, though. It seems more like the series had just run on a little too long and there wasn’t much they could have done about it, especially when upping the frequency from the previous one-game-a-year approach. Plus they both came out too late to coincide with the competitions they were based on.

Tony Dillon of Computer & Video Games wrote in his review of The Games: Summer Edition that “The whole point behind the Games series is that they give all the same twaddle, but dress it up so you think you’re getting something new. And to be honest, they’ve done a fine job at dressing this one up.” “They must be getting really desperate trying to think of more sports to simulate” wrote Kati Hamza in Zzap! 64. On the winter version, Paul Glancey wrote for the same magazine that “the superbly designed and animated graphics are there as ever, but gameplay – where has that gone?”.

  • The Games: Winter Edition (Epyx, 1988, Commodore 64)
  • The Games: Summer Edition (Epyx, 1988, Commodore 64)
  • The Games: Summer Edition (Epyx, 1988, Commodore 64)

This time was also late in the life of the Commodore 64, particularly in the US, where Epyx’s president was futilely telling trade shows that “games can be done better on the 64 than on a Nintendo”. Epyx had expanded and split their focus, giving a lot of attention to developing a handheld gaming machine that would eventually become the Atari Lynx (which got its own version of California Games) and herald financial disaster. The Games: Winter Edition and The Games: Summer Edition were not such big hits here, although they did well as budget rereleases a couple of years later.

Meanwhile, the cultural impact of World Games and California Games was well-demonstrated by the fact that they both received parodies. Gremlin Graphics commissioned Hungarian developers Novotrade to make Alternative World Games, released in 1987. That featured events like boot-throwing, pogo stick and the pillow fight, which actually weren’t that much more out there than some of the original World Games. In 1989, Mindscape released their own locally themed sports compilation, with a Beam Software team (led by Gregg Barnett of The Way of the Exploding Fist renown) channeling a national pride of sorts into Aussie Games. 

  • Alternative World Games (Gremlin, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • Alternative World Games (Gremlin, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • Alternative World Games (Gremlin, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • Aussie Games (Mindscape, 1989, Commodore 64)
  • Aussie Games (Mindscape, 1989, Commodore 64)
  • Aussie Games (Mindscape, 1989, Commodore 64)

Barnett thought that California Games was a bit too serious. He saw it saying that “California had a great lifestyle and these were the things they were doing”. and decided on an Australian piss-take which would “[show] that we had a great lifestyle and show the things we were doing”. This included such events as a dry river boat race, kicking a footy ball along a crowded beach, and a bellyflop (‘bellywack’) contest where one of the judges holding up your marks is a koala. Epyx hadn’t just made and then refined a type of game that people loved, they had created a powerful template.

  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 15 November 1986, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 22 November 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

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