LONDON VAUXHALL DEALERS

Usually when it comes to dealing with sports game we have to call upon Jimmy or Mr Pinkerton to offer their considerably more knowledgeable opinions. But London 2012: The Official Video Game Of The Olympic Games, to give it it's full title, is something we understand.

A direct descendant of retro classics such as Track & Field, Daley Thompson's Decathlon, and Epyx's Summer Games, it aims to be the first Olympics title since the '80s to be a worthwhile gaming experience in its own right.

In the modern era previous Olympics games have been treated as the sporting equivalent of a movie tie-in: a guaranteed hit that's knocked out with the minimum of effort and expense. London 2012 though has been in development for over three years, which is more than most other action games get nowadays, and as a consequence it's looking considerably more interesting.

With over 30 events in the final game we haven't been able to try them all yet, but the sample we did play all seemed extremely accessible and impressively presented. The game is split into three main areas: a single-player Olympics mode, a standard set of multiplayer options, and a selection of less realistic motion-controlled arcade games.

No matter the controls though the emphasis is not on button-bashing but on maintaining a rhythm with your button presses, with even the 100 meters dash requiring a tactical approach more than just jabbing your finger on the joypad button as fast as you can. A well as sprinting we also tried swimming, where the timing becomes even more important as you surface for breath. While in one of cycling events you must choose your moment to engage a burst of speed.

Other events are more unique, including a quick time event filled trampoline game and a pistol shooting event that works nothing like a first person shooter but with its extremely short time limit is still extremely engaging. Kayaking meanwhile is different again, with some particularly impressive water effects as you pilot around the slalom-like assault course.

The only issue we could see is that the game doesn't feature any official athletes, although you can rename them from within the game. According to Sega this puts an emphasis on the idea that it's you competing in the games, not you controlling someone else in them. That seems fair enough to us, especially as the only athlete we'd really like to see in the game retired decades ago.

To our delight Sega had arranged for Daley Thompson (who was looking impressively fit for a man now in his 50s) to be present at the preview event and we managed to steal a few brief minutes with him.

'Probably as much as they talk to me about actual sports, people are always coming up to me to tell me how I've broken their joysticks!' he tells us. 'There's not a day goes by where two or three people, that I pass in the street or whatever, don't mention it to me.'

'I told someone else today I was Tony Hawk before Tony Hawk', he says, quite correctly. 'It's great to be associated with that.'

'It opened it up to a whole different bunch of people, people that weren't necessarily interested in sport and were a bit younger than me. It was awesome, and it still is. It's one of the nice things that people come up to me and say.'

We also managed to talk at greater length with producer Jamie Bailey, about his work on the game and why he thinks London 2012 will be the first Olympics game in a long time to stand on its own merits.

GC: The Mario & Sonic games are okay but I assume you're willing to admit that most other modern Olympics titles have a pretty poor reputation for quality?

JB: I think there are a number of games which were quite quickly brought out and just lived off the licence. Whereas we are trying to actually make something as a standalone title, that deserves a bit more credit in its own right. And so we've worked quite hard at making sure the video game itself is one everyone will want to play. Because one of the key things where these games fell down before is that they were quite one-dimensional. A to B as quickly as possible, jump in the way. That's kind of it.

We wanted to bring a bit more gameplay to the experience, as well as the fun and excitement - and basically for everyone to come together and play it. It's often the case that they can be very singular games, where you're just trying to beat your own time. Whereas we have the ability now to play online, we wanted to make the best of the environment with that. With something where people can easily pick up a mechanic, pick it up easily and yet really have to work hard to master it.

And a lot of the criticism of previous games is that they're very one-dimensional. Once you get it, there's a ceiling and that's it. Whereas we like to think we've made a game where you can pick it up nice and easily, but to make sure you get the highest possible distance or fastest time you've got to work really, really hard to hone your skills.

GC: It certainly must be a difficult project to approach. I mean one of the most famous events is running in a straight line, that's not the most obvious activity to want to adapt into a video game.

JB: [laughs] The first thing I say to everyone is you'd never run from A to B in 10 seconds.

GC: Is it simulation though? Is that how you pitch it or is it just what you imagine the sport would be like if you watched it on TV? Because I imagine a lot of these events, things like trampolining, people probably don't even realise exist as Olympic disciplines - let along understand how they work.

JB: Our pitch was always to make an Olympics experience at home, because as you say, and really rightly, people don't know how it feels to throw a javelin. They know what they should do to do it, but they don't know how it feels. And they don't know how it feels to run a 100 meters in 10 seconds, but they know what they should do.

We wanted to make a simulation at point, because we wanted it to be a grown-up version of the game. But we always wanted to make a video game and what's key is that you can't lose sight of what it is. And as much as we're simulating events - our graphics are really high end - and we're trying to simulate venues more than we are events I think. So we can deliver a video game that is a simulation of events, but with a computer and video game feel.

We don't want people to feel alienated from it, we want them to understand it and feel connected to it, and to be able to identify with it. So delivering a video game where the mechanics are quite simple, you can pick them up nice and quickly, but it feels like you're doing the movements, it feels like you're doing what you know you should do.

Not a lot of people know how to do a trampoline routine, but for that kind of event we brought some things which people are familiar with. They're familiar with the idea of quick time entry, where they have to ensure they deliver the button presses at the right time.

GC: The modern games review poorly but the old ones are very fondly remembered. But that's in part because the technology of the time seemed a much more organic match for the simple rules of a lot of these events. So how do you try to expand on that, while also moving away from button-bashing? Because button-bashing really is the video game equivalent of strenuous exercise.

JB: One of the key things we thought is that… I have very fond memory of it because the very first video game I played at home or owned was Daley Thompson's Decathlon on the ZX Spectrum.

GC: My first was Hyper Sports on the Commodore 64!

JB: I was exactly the same and so we had a massive design decision to say: do we go with button-bashing the way it's always been, as it was in Beijing 2008. Or are people ready to grow it up a bit and so we decided we would change to a pacing mechanic rather than button-bashing. Because it's quite common nowadays, many people are playing dance games and games with that kind of rhythm input. So we decided we would go for more of a pacing.

For certain events like the 100 meters we kept it quick. It's not button-bashing but it's fast. But with the high jump we slow it down and with the javelin we slow it down, so we worked quite hard on making sure we moved the genre onwards. You've got to give people something they enjoy and recognise, but you need to progress it.

And it deserves to be progressed, because it's been a long time since someone's come along with an Olympic video game that stands up against other sports titles. And it's nice to see now that we have a game that comes into that bracket of sports titles, rather than just 'Olympics game'.

GC: Some of the events though, particularly the field ones, they did seem to work very similarly to the old retro games?

JB: Yeah, very similarly. The key thing is we didn't want it to be just about how quickly you could press the button, there is an optimum point. But like you say, those mechanics, people love them because they work and if they're not broken don't try and fix. But we can try and hone it, we can try and improve it and move it forward into what is a more current generation. And it’s a tricky thing, we haven't alienated people that love that but we're hoping we can bring people in who have never really tried it because they were scared of it. It's quite an elitist kind of mechanic.

GC: It was surprising to find that motion controls are used quite sparingly in the game, with most of it parcelled off into their own set of mini-games.

JB: One of the key things about motion controls, and certainly with Kinect and Move, is the social atmosphere. The Olympics mode that we have is a single-player mode. It's designed to be played on your own, to do some unlocking, that type of thing. We see the motion control events as a much more social thing and we would want to have people who can play that in a group and get together

So we sectioned them off and put them somewhere else where people can go and do them. So it's all about play and social groups in that sense. I think it's the first time where mum, child, dad, grandparent, all know the moves and can now do them. So we wanted that in an area where that can happen. We didn't want necessarily to have a full Olympic type.

And also we'd be shoehorning in a lot of mechanics, if we made it a full Olympics mode, because some of the events just don't work with motion controls. I don't know how we'd do the trampoline on Kinect without a lawsuit!

GC: So in the Olympics mode you're just comparing scores with others online? That's as much multiplayer as is involved in that?

JB: In the Olympics mode itself it's designed for you to feel like you've achieved something in that mode. Then we have the optional multiplayer which you can go into and a fantastic mechanic we have, which is a global leaderboard depending on which country you represent. So you can not only represent yourself at the top of the normal leaderboard, but if you win gold you can represent your country on the leaderboard as well. So we have a live Olympics medal table, which is fantastic. But the Olympics mode itself is a singular thing, it's about you wining gold for you.

GC: I do remember a game, I think it was a tie-in for Athens 2004, where you played on a dance mat and ran on the spot when sprinting, etc. And that kind of made sense but it was absolutely exhausting. Did you ever consider anything like that?

JB: We actually did an interesting take on the 100 meters for motion controls, because we actually moved it to the arms. Everyone can move their arms at a good pace, whereas legs are a lot more difficult. And we're not a fitness game, we've never tried to be a fitness game, we are there for the fun elements. And we found that arms are more fun and so we kind of stuck with that.

GC: So how did you pick your final line-up of events, aren't there over 200 different disciplines in the real thing?

JB: We actually prototyped a massive amount of sports. People know certain things about the Olympics but I've had the luxury, and it is a luxury, of spending three years learning about what the Olympics really is. And there's so many sports. At one point we were prototyping over 60, where we were putting basic mechanics in and just had a play, without any graphics, to see whether it worked or not.

There are certain ones you have to pick, you have to have the 100 meters - if you didn't people would really, really hate the idea of not having it. So we went for the blue ribbon, we picked those out, and then we decided, 'What works as a video game?' and 'What do people want to see?', 'What's a bit different?' What's a bit more London as well.

So the venues dictated a bit of what we wanted. We wanted Lords, we wanted archery and we wanted Lords. We wanted Horse Guards and beach volleyball, not just because of the gameplay mechanics but because of the fantastic venue.

GC: Sorry, Lords? But cricket isn't an Olympic sport surely?

JB: Lords is archery. On the pitch itself.

GC: Do they know about this?

JB: [laughs] I met the groundsman, he wasn't a happy man!

GC: [laughs] So what, other than trampoline, are some of the more unusual additions in the game?

JB: We also have the kayak, which I didn't see coming. But it's probably one of the best events we've got. It's got the most ability to win, lose, and the bits in the middle. So very, very cool and we whittled them down bit by bit - we are constrained by time, we always will be, so we had to cut some stuff based on that - and we still came up with a list that was huge. Especially when you add in the arcade takes on Olympic events, where the designers got to play a bit more.

GC: So how many of the arcade events are there?

JB: I think we have six, off the top of my head.

GC: What were some of the technical hurdles you encountered, particularly in terms of the visuals and motion capture?

JB: We've been developing for a really long time, we've been working just around over three years now. A lot of that was getting data from LOCOG [London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games - GC], who've been fantastic and a wonderful help to bring in the venue data and the CAD data for us to build our venues and to be build our places to specifications - so they're really replicated. So we've worked with them very closely but a lot of the development time was spent prototyping, reiterating the game, trying to find interesting takes on mechanics and changing them, tweaking them.

We've also been working together with a sound company in Sheffield could Pit Stop Productions. Previously sports video games have had a script that goes to commentator, gets recorded, and then gets triggered in the game. We didn't think that was going to be good enough for us, because it can sound wooden, it can sound static.

So we decided to actually get the games to them a lot earlier, in development stages, and have a commentator commentate live over the event as if he was working on television or at the venue. And it triggers really, really nicely in game and gives a much more organic feel. We hope it's going to be something the rest of the industry is going to look and say, 'Wow, they did a great job there'.

We've also been quite ground-breaking on motion capture where we've motion captured things that have never been done. For example… trampolining! We put 12 foot poles on each corner of the trampoline and an athlete in a full motion capture suit performing a routine and we've managed to translate that and get it into the game.

GC: Who do you use for that, is it students or something?

JB: We have a studio out in Australia, which is where we've been developing the game in Brisbane. And they share motion capture technology with Queensland University. So we have a studio and rather than students we've been capturing from competitive athletes who are at the top of their game. These are guys that compete at the world championship level. And that's really key to making the game feel fresh and feel real. Other sports games do similar things and so we feel we have to as well.

GC: Ex-Navy SEALs must be dime-a-dozen nowadays but I finding athletics experts to use for some of these specialised sports must be quite difficult.

JB: [laughs] We're really lucky, because in Brisbane there's an institute of sport and we're able to, through them and the various organising committees, find people that want to work with us and who we want to work with. It's very important to get an authentic look to how the athletes move and run. You can instantly tell if a guy is a sprinter or not, even if you're not an expert. If it was me running in the game, you could tell I didn't know what I was doing!

GC: [laughs] Okay, that's great.

JB: Thank you for your time, I really appreciate people asking me questions about it. Because I'm so passionate…

GC: I can see that, and hopefully that's made up for my lack of sporting knowledge. The only thing I can add at this point is can we have a special 1900s edition too? Did you see that QI episode with all the weird events?

JB: Yeah! Amazing stuff.

GC: I'd pay good money for a poetry composing mini-game or dwarf wrestling.

JB: I had medal tables going all the way back through the modern Olympics and one of my favourite events was tug of war, we should get that one back, and 100 meter freestyle swimming for sailors!

GC: [laughs] Just sailors?

JB: Just sailors. Only sailors allowed.

GC: Well, since you're Sega you've got to have that one. Sponsored by Shenmue!

JB: But it's been a fantastic experience, it's the only video game I could honestly recommend to anyone and expect them to enjoy it.

GC: Sure, except now I want a Typing Of The Dead style poetry game. Shall I compare thee to a… 'No I wasn't quick enough typing!'

JB: [laughs]

Formats: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Sega Studios Australia
Release Date: 29th June 2012

Video: Check out the London 2012: The Official Video Game Of The Olympic Games trailer

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