Winter Olympics video game offers icy realism

The Cutting Edge

By Denise Hamilton

Sports and gaming fans can experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat as they navigate through a video game that re-creates the Japanese ski slopes, bobsled runs and slalom jumps to be traversed by athletes competing in the upcoming Olympics.

Nagano Winter Olympics '98, just released, was designed and manufactured by Konami Co. in Japan, a leading developer of electronic entertainment.

"They've got the layout of the mountain, the architectural drawings ... Everything is exact to what's going to happen in the real Olympics," said Randy Severin, senior products manager for Konami of America Inc., the U.S. subsidiary based outside Chicago.

Severin says two teams of up to 40 designers spent a year developing the game in Japan, working with Olympics officials who have licensed it as the official video game of the Winter Games in Nagano, Japan.

"You'll see a snowboarding game out there and some skiing games, but nothing that has 12 or 13 events that are all unique," he says.

Nagano Winter Olympics '98 features 3-D-mapped texture in CAD design and mapped polygon athletes. Players can move from Alpine downhill skiing to giant slalom, speedskating, ski-jumping, bobsled, luge and curling.

Konami officials say they are targeting 12- to 30-year-old males.

"It should do well because it's got a lot of sports," says Greg Zilberbrand, a supervisor at Software Etc. in Culver City (California's) Fox Hills Mall, who says consumers have already come into the store looking for it.

The game is available for Sony PlayStation for about $50 and for Nintendo 64 for $65 and can accommodate one to four players, the company says.

Game Informer magazine's Web site said in its preview that Nagano Winter Olympics '98 would have "plenty of button-tapping in many of the race events, such as speedskating. Other events, such as ski-jumping and slalom skiing, will require more timing and directional movements."

But will this site- and time-specific video game have a shelf life once the athletes jet home from Narita Airport?

"It should," Severin says. "Sure, some of the hype will go away, but it's a fun game to play. It's not just for athletes or gaming fans. It's for everyone."

Konami officials point to the success of an earlier game, International Track and Field, that was released in mid-1996 to coincide with the Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Although Severin declined to give figures, he says that game is still selling well, a claim confirmed by Zilberbrand at Software Etc.

Severin says Konami is still in talks about video game licenses for the Sydney Summer Olympics in 2000.

Konami releases about four major titles a year and has produced sports games before, including International Superstar Soccer 64 and a baseball game called MLBPA: Bottom of the 9th.

Konami was launched in Japan in 1969 as a distributor of pachinko machines and has grown phenomenally, moving aggressively into the video game market. In Japan alone, the firm has 700 research and development employees creating games.

Last year, the publicly traded firm posted half a billion dollars in revenue.

(Denise Hamilton can be reached at hamilton@loop.com)

(c) 1998, Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate

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