Winter Games was developed by Action Graphics and published by Epyx in 1987 for the Atari 2600.
Game Description
Winter Games were released late into the Atari 2600 lifecycle. It is a series of seven events based on various sports that are commonly seen in the winter games.
Eight players can enter the contest, but each player play the event one by the exception of Speed Skating, where two players can play at the same time.
The game also allows the players to go in practice mode to play the individual events.
When choosing the tournament mode, the player can choose between eight countries: the USA, USSR, UK, Japan, Canada, France, Norway and Sweden.
After choosing the country, the players will play eight games in a linear order.
Slalom is the first game. The goal is to have the best time while going down the course, skiing through the 36 gates. Missing one gate will add three seconds to the timer.
Bobsled is the second event. The player two people in the bobsled and must finish the race as fast as possible. The difficulty is to stay fast but avoid crashing on the sides, especially when the bobsled must maneuver the turns.
Ski Jump, the third event, is a scoring-based challenge. As the player skier goes down, he/she must gain as much speed as possible. At the end of the jump, the skier must land back on its ski in order to succeed, which is the challenging part of the event.
Biathlon is the fourth event. It is a combination of skiing and shooting targets. The player first start skiing down the hill. The skier will go faster if the fire button is pressed in sync with the red heart at the bottom of the screen. After finishing the downhill slope, the game switch to the rifle screen, where you must precisely shoot each target in a set of five. The player will then repeat these steps two others time before finishing the events.
Speed Skating is the fifth event. It is the only event in the game that allows two players to play at the same time. If the player plays alone or there is an odd number of players competing, the second skater will be controlled by the CPU. After the “GO” sequence, the player must move the joystick left and right with rhythm to gain speed.
Hot dog is the sixth events. Similar to the Ski Jump event, the player must jump off a slope and land safely. The main difference is that during the jump, the skier must perform different tricks to gain the highest score possible.
Luge is the final event of the game. It is a harder version of bobsled, where you control a single person instead of two in the luge. The difference is that the luge goes faster and it is harder to maneuvers around corners.
After the final event, a screen will show the top three players based on the medal they earned (5 points per gold medal, 3 points per silver medal and 2 points per Bronze Medal.
Winter Games Playthrough
The North American version of Winter Games is used to do this run. The goal is to finish every event with a gold medal with the highest score or lowest time possible.
TAS tools were used in this playthrough.