Summer Games

Memory

The Atari 2600 version of "Summer 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!

Ports

As with the sequel, conversions for Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, ST and Amiga were later made, but only for compilations Gold, Silver, Bronze and Mega Sports.

Awards

• Happy Computer
  • Issue 04/1985 - Best Game in 1984 (Readers' Vote) (Commodore 64, Apple II and Atari 8-bit versions)
• Zzap!
  • May 1985 (Issue 1) - #18 'It's the Zzap! 64 Top 64!'

Information also contributed by Martin Smith