THE EVOLUTION OF SUMMER GAMES

So often the most popular games are refinements of existing ideas rather than entirely original works, and this was certainly the case with the Epyx Olympics-based hit Summer Games. That being said, the title that it improved on was a rival’s cancelled project rather than a proven concept, as former Epyx CEO Mike Katz points out. “We had many venture capitalists on the board at Epyx and one was a company called Early Stages, who had also made an investment in Starpath. But Starpath started running into problems just as Epyx had gained some steam, so Early Stages suggested a merger, and when I saw Starpath’s inventory I got really excited about an Olympic-type game that it had shelved.”

The aspects of the cancelled Atari 2600 title that excited Mike were its multiple events and its timeliness, in so much as Starpath’s Sweat! The Decathlon Game could be used as a blueprint for a game that could capitalise on the upcoming Olympics. “I loved that Starpath had built-in sustained gameplay and value,” Mike enthuses, “and the idea of a multi-event game tied in very well with the Olympics coming up. So we finished that concept, and we added countries and national anthems and flags. We also polished up the events, and made as many of them as possible, and we made each event as much fun as we could.”

Not all of the events in Starpath’s decathlon game made it. “I would imagine we were going for a combination of the most popular events in terms of those watched on TV and our ability to realistically execute the action in each event that we chose,” Mike contemplates. “Dropping two events that were under development for the Starpath game might also have been a matter of disk space or loading time.”