Trigger Happy
72
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
_________________
12 Crawford,
The Art of Computer Game Design,
p. 28.
