The summer Olympics are here. During the last summer Olympics, I had just quit working at Kotaku and had a lot of free time, so I got a trial cable subscription and woke up at 4am to tweet about the climbing while pretending I was hanging out with Mark Serrels, which was clearly a healthy and normal way to be. This time around, I’ve only been able to watch it by peering through the windows of neighborhood bars that are playing the events on television, and this missing out has made me wonder if I can get my Olympics fix through video games.
But these Olympics are apparently the first summer Olympics not to have a console game tie-in. This includes there being no Sonic & Mario game, which Eurogamer reports is due to the International Olympic Committee not renewing its license with Nintendo and Sega in 2020, according to a long-time veteran of the series:
"[The IOC] wanted to look at other partners and NFTs and esports," Lee Cocker, who worked on almost every entry in the series, told Eurogamer. "Basically the IOC wanted to bring [it] back to themselves internally and look at other partners so they would get more money."
That partner is developer nWay, who created the mobile game Olympics Go! Paris 2024, which you can also play on PC on the Epic store. (As part of this, nWay has also created an Olympics NFT, which in 2024 is a simply embarrassing choice.) I checked out Olympics Go on PC last night, looking to get my Olympics game fix. There are 12 sports with unlockable difficulty levels; the shooting, archery, rowing, and cycling felt the most tolerable to me, with click-based controls that translated the best from touch to mouse. But all the sports are pretty simple mechanically, mostly clicking and swiping until your avatar crosses a line. Nothing in the game is particularly exciting, though it might feel a little more engaging on your phone while riding the bus than sitting at your desk.
Despite the trappings of Olympic competition like medals and leaderboards, the game feels mostly focused on the kinds of microtransactions and incentives to spend you’d expect from a free-to-play mobile game. There’s a city management layer, where you upgrade and add outbuildings to various Olympic stadiums. It’s an interesting idea, or would be if its whole purpose wasn’t to generate the in-game currency of “fan points.” You spend these points on more buildings, as well as “training” your athlete to level them up. There are other currencies as well: energy, which you spend to compete in events and which regenerates over time, or gems that can be used to buy outfits or more energy. I spent a lot of my time in the game clicking on my buildings to harvest their points, while the game occasionally reminded me that its paid store existed. Olympics Go feels more like a mobile game attempting to cash in on Olympics hype than a celebration of the Games themselves.
My experience playing Olympics Go stood in stark contrast to the one other Olympics game I’ve played, which is Winter Olympics: Lillehammer '94 for the Game Gear. I don’t remember why I owned the game–that might have been the year young me was obsessed with Olympic speed skating and used to pretend-skate along with the TV–but I played the hell out of it for years. In my memory, my runs through its slate of events were epic journeys, full of all the highs and lows I imagined real athletes experienced. The game’s feeling of competition and achievement (as well as its visuals, like the trees in the biathlon level and the moguls in the skiing events) are still the first things that come to my mind when I think of the word “Olympics” 30 years later.
Played so intensely at a young age, my positive associations with Lillehammer 94 are surely what an official Olympic video game intended me to feel about the Olympics themselves. Video games play a role as a marketing arm of what Defector called “the illusion of the Olympics as an apolitical gesture of peace and unity.” The Olympics are notoriously bad for their host cities, as well as for the environment. They’re our highest profile example of sportswashing– this will soon include esportswashing too, in the form of the Olympic Esports Games to be held in 2025 in Saudi Arabia. There’s a history of bribery and politicking, and this is to say nothing of the weirdness of nationalism generally. And training and competing take a toll on athletes’ physical and mental health, with covid adding a whole new level of risk.
There’s a way in which the disappointment of Olympics Go, with its microtransactions and NFT, captures my relationship to the Olympics themselves as an adult. I need to embrace a certain naivete to enjoy the Games these days, and I wrestle with the individual human achievement of the Games against their context. Maybe the crassness of Olympics Go is good, actually, in that it’s a more accurate rendition of some of the truth of the Olympics. Maybe my rosy childhood memories of Lillehammer 94 are just propaganda for an event that is itself already propaganda.
I’m not here to be a downer who demands you not enjoy the Olympics; like everything these days and also throughout history, they have good aspects and bad aspects. Maybe video games are the perfect place for the Olympics fantasy, where I can see the Games as I wish they were, removed from the cost of that fantasy in real life. Or maybe the shabby reality of Olympics Go, and the dearth of Olympics games to take its place this year, is the kind of wakeup call I need.
