Trigger Happy
Running up that hill
Perhaps the most perverse-looking class of videogame on first inspection is the sports game. After all, videogames are supposedly played in darkened rooms by people who never get any real physical exercise. But in their hovels they can be tennis demons, baseball stars or gifted golfers, or control a whole football or basketball team to world victory.
In its own sweetly abstract way, Pong, of course, was the first sports game. Subsequent refinements of the Pong engine claimed to simulate soccer with four paddles and two sets of goalposts, but the games were unconvincing. Chris Crawford understandably claimed in 1984: “I suspect sports games will not attract a great deal of design attention in the future”12 —just before higher-resolution graphics on home computers saw a new wave of sports games become highly successful. Konami’s Track and Field, Epyx’s Summer Games and Winter Games, and Ocean’s Daley Thompson’s Decathlon were all early hits on machines such as the Spectrum and Commodore 64, multi-event games that required the player to control tiny but well-animated
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12 Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, p. 28.
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