When The Activision Decathlon was released in the UK in summer 1984, it got a popularity boost from coinciding with the Los Angeles Olympics. People often want to play their own version of what they’ve been watching on TV, be that Wimbledon or Olympic athletics. Beyond that, though, in Britain it was an even better time for a decathlon game specifically, and Activision wouldn’t be the ones to benefit from the association the most. Their decathlon game was immediately overtaken by another, (kind of) homegrown one which went on to be one of the most popular games of the year.

  • The Activision Decathlon (Activision, 1983/1984, Commodore 64)
  • The Activision Decathlon (Activision, 1983/1984, Commodore 64)

In the 1980s, British Olympic sport was not yet awash with carefully-directed National Lottery cash, and success was a lot less frequent than in more recent times. At the 1980 Olympics in Moscow and at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Great Britain won just five gold medals each time. That was despite much of the best opposition being missing from each, thanks to USA- and USSR-led boycotts respectively. Among those few gold medal winners there were two Brits who won in both 1980 and 1984, and one of those was Daley Thompson, who won those medals in the decathlon.

Daley Thompson was an incredibly successful athlete, who won the decathlon in every major competition he entered for nine years running from 1978. He was also box office. In 1982 he won the public vote for Sports Personality of the Year. At the BBC’s formal award ceremony he wore his tracksuit and started off his acceptance speech with “I feel like shit”. Britain’s tabloid press treated him how they treat anyone successful, British and Black, and he used their confected outrage as more fuel for his determination to keep winning. 

After he won his gold at the 1984 Olympics, Daley Thompson whistled along to the national anthem on the podium (resultant headline: “Champ Chump”) and joked about having children with Princess Anne. He also decided that the best response to American athlete Carl Lewis getting more attention than him was to do a press conference while wearing a homophobic T-shirt playing on rumours about Lewis’s sexuality as a way of calling him the world’s second greatest athlete. Thompson’s anti-establishment tendencies were thrown into further relief by the contrast with Britain’s other double gold winner in 1980 and 1984: Sebastian Coe, a man so establishment he is now the head of World Athletics.

Daley Thompson was happy to use his high profile for commercial purposes. He soon appeared in adverts for Lucozade, and he also signed up for an opportunity to lend his name to a computer game. This was far from a first — Atari released Pele’s Soccer in 1981 and I would be surprised if there was nothing earlier — but for a sportsperson at the top of their career was fairly pioneering. The offer came from Ocean, who had already achieved UK #1 success with Donkey Kong rip-off Kong and arcade conversion Hunchback. It’s not clear the order of operations for how Ocean got to Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, but in whichever sequence, they landed on the dual idea of doing a Daley Thompson game and basing it on Konami’s arcade game Hyper Olympic/Track & Field (it was known here by both titles at different points). 

  • Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (Ocean, 1984, Commodore 64)
  • Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (Ocean, 1984, ZX Spectrum)

Konami released Hyper Olympic in Japan in 1983 as an official Olympic game. It included six different events from within the decathlon, with just the 100 metres as far as straightforward running went. One innovation was in making throwing or jumping more than the work of a single button tap, instead having the length of time the button was held decide the angle of elevation. Bennett Foddy, who was later inspired to make comically difficult running game QWOP, explained the effect to Rolling Stone: “You need to enter a kind of timeless Zen state to press buttons really fast, and then suddenly break out of that mental state and enter a precise timing state to do the precision button press.”

Konami also did away with joysticks altogether, giving players two buttons to alternate for running. Players came up with various tools to let them do this faster than with their bare hands, from combs to rulers to gachapon capsules to camera film containers. Such tools were banned at the international competition Hyper Olympic was enough of a success to be able to launch. It was won by American Phil Britt, who instead used a six-finger rolling technique.

  • Hyper Olympic (Konami, Arcade, 1983)
  • Hyper Olympic (Konami, Arcade, 1983)

Ocean looked at Hyper Olympic/Track & Field and decided it would be the perfect basis for a home computer release. Signing up Daley Thompson, one of the UK’s biggest sports stars, and turning it into a full decathlon seems like a logical move from there, so similarities to The Activision Decathlon might just have been coincidence. Ocean co-owner David Ward had previously lived in America, though, so there was a greater than average chance of him being in touch with console games.

Daley Thompson’s Decathlon is not an official version of Hyper Olympic/Track & Field (Atari would release one of those on Commodore 64 the following year), but is no less obvious a rip-off than Kong was of Donkey Kong. The events all work in the same way, with their crucial angle of release, celebration animations are the same, and the screen layout takes some obvious inspiration. Even the circular alphabet layout for entering the player’s initials is the same. Retro Gamer later asked Tony Pomfret, who worked on the Commodore 64 version of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, whether Ocean consulted any lawyers to avoid copyright issues. “Did they fuck”.

  • Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (Ocean, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (Ocean, 1984, Commodore 64)

The precise level of resemblance differs a little between different formats, with the Commodore 64 and Spectrum versions developed in parallel to tight deadlines, and quite different from each other. The C64 version was the work of David Collier, Bill Barna, Tony Pomfret, Martin Galway and David Dunn, and made it out slightly earlier to be the first one to top the arcade chart. It soon got overshadowed by the colossal success of the ZX Spectrum version, which hit #1 a few weeks later at the end of September and stayed there long enough to cross over into the game being #1 in Gallup’s new, more comprehensive, chart. 

The Spectrum version united Paul Owens (of Kong) and Christian Urquhart (of Hunchback), and offered them some unique graphical challenges. The C64 version has a reasonable likeness of Daley Thompson himself, moustache and all, but for the Spectrum they were forced to ask him which single-coloured sprite he would prefer, red or white. He opted for white. The sprite is big and expressive and looks nothing like Daley Thompson whatsoever. David Thorpe, who did the loading screen artwork, didn’t have it much easier, later suggesting that getting the Olympic rings through the Spectrum’s attribute clash issues was one of his biggest ever technical challenges.

The extra events give Daley Thompson’s Decathlon a chance to do some bits of its own. The Spectrum version has a nice vworpy version of “Chariots of Fire” that plays at the end of each day (The C64 loading screen has a version of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “Rydeen”, which is wild). Ocean opted against turning the 1,500 metres into a waggling endurance test, instead having your buttons increase or decrease speed and giving an energy meter to balance that against. They also give you three lives to use across the events rather than Konami’s stricter single chance to meet qualification standards. It turns the game into a slightly odd halfway house between arcade challenge and Activision’s more generous simulation, but that is at least its own distinct flavour.

Some magazines set it directly against The Activision Decathlon, with Computer & Video Games running a joint review that called Daley Thompson’s Decathlon an arcade copycat and gave it the silver medal of the two. Sinclair User’s Chris Bourne, against all evidence, wrote about it being a licensed version of Track & Field. “Arcade conversions do not always work on the small screen. Daley Thompson’s Decathlon is an exception, and captures the spirit of the competition”. Sinclair Programs was less positive. “With lots of practice or a lucky fluke you will bring the Olympic crowd cheering to its feet, unless the tips of your fingers wear away first or you think of something better to do”.

  • Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (Ocean, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (Ocean, 1984, Commodore 64)

The success of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon was another triumph of marketing as much as of programming, but getting in early on this style of game was a smart move, especially on the Spectrum which never got Activision’s game. The details, perhaps, are less important than the simple pleasure of wresting a joystick or pair of keys into delivering speed, a sports game making use of the way playing games could already resemble sporting performance. Players enjoyed Daley Thompson’s Decathlon for long enough to vote it the best arcade-style game of 1984 in both Computer & Video Games’ Golden Joystick Awards and Crash’s Reader Awards of the year.

Daley Thompson himself continued a relationship with the game well beyond the ‘80s, fronting interviews for an official new mobile version in 2012. He had plenty of incentive to play up the importance of its original, but there’s some ring of truth in his answer nonetheless, not least because of the unrehearsed-seeming mix-up between keyboards and joysticks. “The question that’s cropped up most over the last 20-odd years when people meet me is “Are you any good at Daley Thompson’s Decathlon?”. As soon as I’ve answered that, they’ll then jokingly inform me that I owe them money for a new keyboard.”

  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 8 September 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 29 September 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 06 October 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 13 October 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 20 October 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 27 October 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 03 November 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 10 November 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 17 November 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 24 November 1984, Home Computing Weekly [chart categories swapped in error]
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 01 December 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats for week ending 05 December 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats for week ending 12 December 1984, Home Computing Weekly

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