Atari 2600

California Games

Description

California Games was the original "Extreme Games" – what today's generation might call "X-Games in the sun". Players can select sponsors (absent in some versions) and compete in events such as skateboarding, footbag, surfing, roller skating, flying disc (frisbee) and BMX. The surfing event is ranked by judges, which give a score to help the players improve their routine.

The Atari versions (2600 and Lynx) of the game omit the flying disc and roller skating events, while the Genesis version omits only the flying disc event.

Alternate Titles

• "Jogos de Verão" -- Brazilian SEGA Master System title
• "Calgames" -- Informal title

Part of the Following Groups

• California Games series
• Epyx "Games" series

Merchant Title Platform Price   California Games Atari 2600 Atari 2600 $1.65   California Games     Please select your country: United States Argentina Australia Austria Belgium Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Canada Chile China Colombia Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Ireland Israel Italy Japan Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Macedonia Malaysia Malta Mexico The Netherlands New Zealand Norway Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Russia Saudi Arabia Serbia Singapore Slovakia Slovenia South Africa South Korea Spain Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom Uruguay Other Worldwide Not an American user?

User Reviews

There are no reviews for the Atari 2600 release of this game. You can use the links below to write your own review or read reviews for the other platforms of this game.

The Press Says

The Video Game Critic	Jun 16, 2001	A	100
The Atari Times	Aug 29, 2005	90 out of 100	90

Forums

There are currently no topics for this game.

Trivia

The Atari 2600 version of "California Games," released in the later years of Atari's dominance in the Home Video Game market, was one of a handful of games that used 16K of memory! The Atari 2600 had been designed to only run cartridges of 2K and 4K in size. Games that were written to exceed that 4K memory limitation required the "bank swapping" technique in order to access 8K, 12K, and even 16K game cartridges.

Memory was still expensive in the 1980's, yet the public wanted more and more advanced games, especially since it had been several years now since the release of the many popular 8-bit home computer systems that had been flooding the market and reducing in cost. And with the Nintendo Entertainment System having just been released, the Atari 2600 was beginning to look very dated. In order to satisfy the public’s craving for games requiring increasing amounts of memory, creating a bigger game for the Atari 2600 was the only way to do it.

In order to handle the expansiveness of their games, Epyx released all three of their Olympic-based games with multiple ROM chips equaling the necessary 16K. Using bank-swapping, the various ROM chips could be accessed and swapped as needed. And all of it was embedded within a standard-sized Atari 2600 Cartridge!