Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, covering everything from specialty computers of the 80s to the halcyon days of Windows XP.
As the Olympics came on the television, displaying countless extraordinary feats of human athleticism, and the warm summer sun shone across grassy playing fields across the land, it was almost as if the universe itself was encouraging me to get into sports. Good luck with that; I have a body built for typing and the pale skin of a blind cave fish whose entire species hasn’t seen the light of day for millennia. But in the spirit of the season, I was willing to meet reality halfway and make the Olympics, or at least an evolving digital version of it, my own, with Konami’s Hyper Sports trilogy of MSX PC games from 1984-85. If I can use games to imitate a tough mech pilot or a powerful samurai, or pretend I’m a walking juice box of a vampire elf, then surely it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to pretend I could leap off a diving board at high speed without spraining my ankle at a medically horrific angle.
Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much more from the games than a half hour of fun. Sports games, especially ones as old as this one, are mostly known for being entertainingly superficial, button-mashing collections of mediocre minigames and not much else. Wiggle the joystick to sprint. Wiggle the joystick to swim. Press the keyboard to jump really high. Press the keyboard to jump really high, but this time the background is blue instead of green. Not exactly a gold medal-winning experience.
Japan’s MSX wasn’t considered a particularly powerful computer even in the mid-1980s, so it certainly couldn’t realistically reproduce the complexity of gymnastic movements, the intricacies of archery, or the wild moves of curling. Professional sport is a demanding competition where years of intensive training, mental focus, and physical effort are fused into something new and wonderful in a few intense, life-changing seconds. The MSX thought the ability to display 16 colors simultaneously (and at most) was all it needed, and a dedicated digital controller for gaming was a nice optional extra.
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How did I suddenly find myself obsessed with the opening event of Hyper Sports 1, determined to perfect my double somersault into the water and finally prove to the only judge who dared to give me a 6/10 that ruined my progress, incorrect?
OK – I admit that this was partly because all three games insisted that I play through their handful of events in a strictly linear order, with no skipping or continuing. Absolutely no weight lifting for me unless I learned how to do skeet shooting, no fun on the long horse or bouncy trampoline without mastering that jump. No matter what the sport, the passing requirements are always high, requiring true understanding and mastery of each event before I can move on to the next.
But mostly I kept playing because I was having so much fun. Even this simple beginner task was demanding a lot of me, and I wanted to get it right. That first jump off the board was crucial to my success, my nameless athlete in tight white trunks doing three jumps before diving into the water. If I could hit the spacebar at just the right moment each time, they would jump higher and higher into the air, buying me more time for the next part – the flips. The more of these I could do, the higher my score would be, and to do that I had to take a lot of breath and then hammer the right cursor key on my keyboard fast enough to wonder if there was anyone else at Konami I could bill for the wear and tear.
Mindless tapping wasn’t enough either, as a belly flop into the water would have ruined my score, so I had to spin as much as possible, but never so much that I couldn’t hit the space bar just before the end to straighten my diver and ensure a graceful and hopefully score-winning end to my aquatic feat.
No matter what I did, from triple jumping to trampolining, I was continually fascinated by a sports game that is two or three times older than most of the living athletes in the Paris 2024 Games. The second game’s archery competition was another favorite, testing my ability to time my actions in two different ways at once.
At the most basic level, I fired an arrow at a slow-moving target, and had to take into account the random wind speed. But the amount of time I held the fire button down also mattered, as this determined the angle of the shot. If I held it down just a fraction too long, or not long enough, the arrow could miss the point-rich center of the board, or maybe even miss the board entirely. There was no magic formula in the game to artificially get it right every time. I just had to be quick, consistent, and practice.
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Of course, nothing in these games is an accurate representation of real-life events—a complete amateur can’t, unfortunately, perform blatant triple somersaults 30 feet in a matter of seconds by simply pressing a single cursor key at switch-breaking speed, and professional cycling probably requires a bit more thought than riding really fast all the time and making sure the other person doesn’t get in front of me. But for now, this trio of little games from decades ago feels so close to the real thing that the lines between the two are blurring a little. My reflexes, physical endurance, and knowledge of the nuances of each discipline are being put to the test, and I’m not going to get anywhere if I don’t try hard.
And just like in real sport, I want to put in that effort, even if it’s hard and the road to perfection is long. I’m better at these events than I was yesterday, but not as good as I was tomorrow. My keyboard won’t last until the next Olympics, but my enthusiasm for these games definitely will.
