I’m of the firm belief that video games can be used to make someone a fan something in the real world. Many talented musicians started playing instruments after picking up Guitar Hero. I have friends who still skate after starting in the warehouse with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on the N64. I even became a massive sports fan through playing EA Sports Games on the Xbox 360.
I want to stress this too, video games were genuinely my intro to competitive athletics. The world of sports might as well have been mars at that point, but the tandem of EA’s NHL and NCAA games helped me understand everything from junior leagues, drafts, trade deadlines, free agencies, even salary cap circumvention. As a result I went from ignorantly hating all sports, writing them off as dumb macho jock entertainment, to where I am now, a former college athlete who could not envision a world without competitive athletics.
Unfortunately, though, there are some sports that you simply can’t learn to appreciate without playing them yourself because there just are no good video games for them. I ran cross country and track for example. The Olympics are special for me and for many other similarly situated athletes because it’s the one time I can finally see my sport on the global stage. My heartbeat slows when the 10k shoots off, I feel my blood turn cold like I am out there racing with them, but I realize that few people can ever share in this level of visceral interest.
I’ve often wished that there were at least one good video game that I could recommend to friends interested in track and field and other Olympic sports, so that the Olympics comes across as a bonanza of the best of sports, rather than a confusing collage of esoteric athleticism.
Some game designers have tried, but ultimately failed, to bring the experience of the summer and winter games to home consoles and computers. The most recent of these companies is Nintendo, who just recently lost their license to even make games based on the Olympics because the IOC wants to focus on NFTs and e-sports. While their Mario and Sonic efforts certainly weathered the tides and stayed decent, they’ve never actually been great, let alone good; They are far from the medal podium. This is an idea that has plagued game designers for years, even going back as early as the NES, whose Olympic Winter Games was so terrible that it warranted its own AVGN episode.
Before anyone brings up World Class Track Meet on the NES, I want them to consider that if the game is only really fun if you own a peripheral controller that basically just makes you run, why bother playing to being with? The Power Pad may have been innovative for its time, but I don’t know if I can recommend friends shell out $60 for one on eBay just to better understand the 100M dash.
So before another publisher or indie dev gets too ambitious, I want to examine why any game based on, well, The Games doesn’t fair too well.
THE GAMES ARE TOO FAR APART
A four year wait for a three week event is tough amount of time to gather and build interest for a video game. Obviously, to get that boost of opening-day sales it would make sense to release the game shortly before the opening ceremony, but then what’s to be done about the intermediary period, like next year, and the year after, and the year after? Sure enough, the winter games can have their own virtual counterpart, but saying that those two video games should be similar is like saying salmon tastes the same as chicken because of they’re both good sources of protein.
None of the other major sports have this problem. Each game comes out, carries players to and through the season, keeping the roster updated along the way, then holds players over through the offseason.
Soccer used to have this problem, but now that people are familiar enough with all of the major leagues and the structure of European soccer, their purchase of EAFC doesn’t need to be fueled by world cup fever anymore.
LACK OF COMPLEXITY
I love running. I almost definitely love it more than you do, you ever did, or ever will. With that said, I can still call a spade a spade and tell you that there’s not much to it. There is no single track event that requires the amount of complexity that modern video game controllers offer. The same thing goes for swimming. There’s definitely a bit more complexity with sports like diving, fencing, gymnastics, and archery. Wii Sports and its offshoots were the best at bringing some of these events to the digital realm, however even the best of these were relatively shallow novelty based mini games. As much fun as they were, I can’t say Wii Baseball or Tennis really brought the sport to life.
These days though, people do not want to spend even as much as 40 dollars on a mini game compilation. Some of these simple sports could be better handled by independent developers
TOO MANY EVENTS
By the same token, there’s no way a dual layered Blu-ray disk can hold enough data to have fully fleshed out sports like track, swimming, and gymnastics while also doing justice to sports that have their own fully fledged games like tennis, basketball, and skateboarding. The code for the most recent NBA 2K game is built over years and years of code to give us a functional product, to the point that it resembles Soviet submarines the way working old bits are kept and expected to keep working with the new doodads that the next generation demands.
Some sports would be such an undertaking to properly bring to life too it’d hard to imagine their popularity would justify the time spent making them. Which would be tougher, coding a satisfying handball or water-polo game, or being able to market them to the masses. There are 329 medal events in this Summer Olympics, across 35 sports and 53 disciplines. It’d take several Olympic cycles to get all these sports properly represented.
NAME IMAGE LIKENESS
It held up the NCAA games for a literal decade. If people want an Olympic game to have the same authenticity and presentation of any EA Sports game, that will mean getting all the legitimate athletes, from all of the legitimate countries in here. You think any hardcore runner wants to play UNNAMED AMERICAN ATHLETE? Hell no, I want to play as Craig Engles, and I’m getting him the gold medal that he deserves!
Given the sheer volume of athletes, it would be remarkably ambitious to see any company go through with the licensing, and how the IOC would go around it, but if it can happen for the NCAA, maybe it can happen for the Olympics. I doubt it given that there are generally around 3,000 Olympic athletes per cycle, but a man can dream.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE
With these problems here, one may be searching for a solution, and that solution is divide and conquer.
Different studios need to each individual take responsibility not for the entirety of the summer games, but a small handful, perhaps even one if it’s executed well, like basketball, soccer, or handball. These could either be big budget projects like the EA or 2K games, or pixelated indie romps that handle some of the easier-to-understand difficult-to-master sports. Perhaps Konami could even make their glorious return to real gaming by finally giving us some decent track and field games again. I’d love to imagine an Olympic comittee who saw the marketing potential of these games as a way of indoctrinating the youth into the joy of the Olympics. You could sell sports individually or package them all together, and I’d imagine some of the video game versions would take on a culture independent of the sport they’re representing.
Then once we have one game for each sport, we have them all played in Saudi Arabia or whoever wants to dole out the proper moula for their Olympic e-sports concept, and see who the true greatest cyber athlete of all time is. Maybe, just maybe, we could even have a medalist for Mario & Sonic At The Olympic Games, at the Olympic games. A plumber and a hedgehog can dream at least.
