Original Release: Electronic Arts, 1988, Commodore 64
Other Releases: PC (1989), NES (1990)
So you thought the first Olympics was in ancient Greece? No, it was founded by ancient Grunk … dinosaur riding, wife tossing, fire making and more are all on the schedule.
Caveman Ugh-lympics (PC, EA, 1989)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: MS-DOS Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
An early product from Jeff Tunnell, co-founder of Dynamix and developer of a number of noteworthy titles for Electronic Arts and Activision on the side, Ughlympics is a cute prehistoric Olympics parody that suffers from odd gameplay and general clunkiness.
This was one of the games I had for my first computer as a little kid, and I remember being frustrated with not being able to figure out exactly how the controls worked for some of the events; I’m not sure if I ever even made it through a full Ughlympics. Coming back to it decades later … pretty much the same story! The threadbare manual included with the game gives you just enough instructions to work with, but not enough to tell you exactly what you’re doing wrong when they don’t seem to work. But without the manual, you’re REALLY in trouble and probably not even getting off the ground with certain events like Mate Toss and Fire Making.
The basic gist of it is that it works like popular Olympic arcade titles of the time such as Track & Field and Hyper Sports. It was designed for the one-button joysticks of the time, but you can also play with the directional pad and the “Insert” key as the substitute for the fire button. You’d think that would make things simple, but not really, because certain events rely on full and complete rotation (Mate Toss) or very specific input combinations and timing (Fire Making, Dino Race). At times it feels like the prototype of entering fussy fighting game inputs, except that’s all you do over and over.
A smaller issue is that it was also designed expressly for hotseat play. It is neat that it has a split screen in some events and two players can race simultaneously, that’s not a bad feat at all for 1988 computers and it all works pretty well aside from the iffy controls at times. However, if you try to play an Ughlympics solo you’ll find that you’re just “score attacking” each event to beat your own prior records rather than actually competing against other computer-controlled players. And as far as multiplayer goes, not every event is balanced, some have a simple trick to exploit, for example endless foot-sweeping is by far the quickest way to win in the club fight.
Add in the obnoxious honking internal speaker sound and you’ve got a package that looks cute and interesting in screenshots but is a pretty rough experience to actually play. There was an NES port two years later (as “Caveman Games”) that you would think might have improved the control issues, but various internet reviews indicate it really didn’t … but we’ll leave that one for another day.
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