Main

What's New

Import Stores

Import Reviews

Import Cover Archive

Special Features

Games

The Top 100

Video Game Fiction

Wanted!

Acknowledgements

Forum

Links

View the OPCFG Guestbook
Sign the OPCFG Guestbook

Video Olympics (aka Pong Sports) - Atari - 1978



Video Olympics was Atari's Pong cartridge, containing all sorts of variations on Pong, as you can see by looking at the above pic. That's all this game was. I remember reading a review of Video Olympics that Craig Kubey had written in his excellent early-'80s book The Winner's Book Of Video Games - in it, he categorized all of the games on the cartridge like this:

1) Pong
2) Son of Pong
3) Grandson of Pong
4) Great-grandson of Pong
5) Great-great grandson of Pong
6) Nephew of Pong
7) Great-nephew of Pong
8) Next-door Neighbor of Pong
9) Some weirdo on the subway that Pong may have brushed shoulders with

So if you like Pong, you could just get the cartridge and play Pong, Pong, Pong and more Pong. I did not like Pong that much, but my parents got the game for my sister, who apparently did. Well, that's fine, except that the only problem is once you got outside of plain old Pong and into some of the other "games" on this cartridge, you begin to see how bad they were - especially Volleyball and Basketball. Ugh. They were nothing at all like the real thing. They were bizarre mutations of Pong that were supposed to appeal to the people that did like Pong, but they failed miserably.

And what the hell did this game have to do with the Olympics, anyway? I don't recall a Pong competition ever being in the Olympics, or a Superpong or Quadrapong competetion either. The Sears Telesystems title, Pong Sports, was so much better, because it at least described what you were getting when you bought the thing. Video Olympics was such a misleading title. I can just imagine the people that bought the Atari version, going home and playing it - then the cries of outrage coming from them when they realized it was just fifty variations of Pong. *sigh*



home