The Annals Of Andrew, Part 2

Now for the Commodore 64 Summer Olympics story...

As you learned yesterday, my brother Eric gave me a portable C64 when I was in my preteens. Along with the machine, he gave me tons of games. One of those games was Epyx's Summer Games. In this game, you'd choose a player and the country your player was representing. Then you'd take the player through a series of Summer Olympics competitions.

The game featured an opening ceremony with doves, and at the end your players would be ranked and the Gold medal winner's national anthem would be played as they all stood on the podium. That is how it came to be that Andrew and I could hum the national anthem of most every country in the world. Of course, we've since forgotten how they all went, except for one country. Epyx. Oh, Epyx isn't a country, you say?? In this game it was, and we'd fight over who got to be from Epyx, because their national anthem was the coolest. It had a syncopation, which wasn't easy to accomplish back in the days when songs on the computer were made up of blips and beeps. (in the link above, you can see the Epyx flag)

Andrew and I played this game for hours on end. We'd play until our fingers were bleeding, and I can't believe that the A and D, and J and L keys on my keyboard survived the beating. You see, that's how your player would run. You'd hit the A and D or the J and L keys, depending on which player you were, as fast as you could, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The faster you could hit the keys, the faster your dude would run or swim. I'd practice so hard when Andrew wasn't around. I'd play a one player set, and try to figure out all the tricks. But of course, Andrew always won.

Now, if you saw the picture of the C64 screen, you can imagine how funny it must have looked...the two of us, him over 6 feet tall and me not far behind, sitting in front of that tiny screen for hours, hunched over and sharing one keyboard, hitting those keys as fast as we could over and over.


I'm sure Andrew's got some funny Summer Games memories, maybe he'll post some in the comments...