World Games

World Games abandons the purely Olympic framework and offers a collection of unconventional sporting events from around the world, including sumo wrestling, bull riding, cliff diving, log-rolling lumberjack competitions, weightlifting, and stone-skimming across a river. The player picks the country they compete for and goes through the individual events either alone or in competition with another player, with each event having its own simple but precisely timed controls corresponding to the given sport and its real-world form, though necessarily simplified in the eight-bit hardware's rendition.

On the Atari 800/XL, the game builds on the same technical foundation as the previous titles in the Epyx sports series, but is visually more varied thanks to its more exotic locations — from a Japanese sumo ring through cliff faces to Scandinavian lumberjack competitions and South American landscapes. The animation of individual athletes remains legible and functional, though because of the number of varied events the game places less emphasis on the detail of individual movements than, say, figure skating in Winter Games. Humor and exaggeration, with which some events are portrayed, give the game a lighter tone compared to the more serious Olympic titles in the series, and players could thus enjoy a purely curious experience of unconventional sports.

World Games was praised at release precisely for the originality of its choice of sports, which broke away from the established Olympic canon and offered players something new after years of similarly conceived titles from the same studio. Today the game serves as an interesting demonstration of how Epyx played with the multi-event sports game format and sought new inspiration beyond the classic sports canon, and thanks to its curious selection of events it remains a beloved memory of the eight-bit era among fans of the genre. Choosing the country you represent also gave the game a flavor of international competition that ultimately distinguished World Games from the purely individual sporting challenges of its predecessors.

Why play it: For players craving an unconventional selection of sports outside the Olympic canon, it offers a curious, internationally flavored lineup of events that refreshed the genre in a new direction.