Hyper Sports

Hyper Sports from 1984 is a direct sequel to the athletics game Track & Field, and from developer Konami it inherits the same recipe – a series of Olympic events controlled by frantic button-mashing combined with precise timing of a jump or throw. The player goes through eight events, including pole vault, shooting, equestrian triathlon, rowing, hammer throw, archery, diving, and combined events, with each discipline requiring a different rhythm and control style, so that no two feel the same.

Unlike its predecessor, where the main goal was simply running the track as fast as possible, Hyper Sports puts greater emphasis on variety of movement and precise timing – in the pole vault you need to correctly judge the moment to push off, in shooting you must aim and fire within a narrow time window, and in rowing you need to keep a steady rhythm with both oars. The graphics and sound remain faithful to the 8-bit aesthetic of the mid-1980s, but the character animations are smoother than in the first game, and the individual events are visually well distinguished from one another.

In arcades, the game became popular mainly for the competitiveness it sparked at the joystick, with players literally wearing out the sticks by rapidly switching directions in an attempt to beat a friend by a fraction of a second, and arcade operators regularly complained about worn-out controllers. Hyper Sports was later also ported to home computers and consoles, which brought it to players outside of arcades as well. Even today it remains a typical representative of the athletics arcade genre that defined an entire era of arcades in the early 1980s.

Why play it: Eight varied events force the player into quick hand coordination and competing over every fraction of a second, exactly the way only arcade machines of that era could.