Winter Games

Memory

The Atari 2600 version of Winter Games, released in the later years of Atari's dominance in the Home Video Game market, was one of a handful of games that used 16K of memory! The Atari 2600 had been designed to only run cartridges of 2K and 4K in size. Games that were written to exceed that 4K memory limitation required the "bank swapping" technique in order to access 8K, 12K, and even 16K game cartridges.

Memory was still expensive in the 1980's, yet the public wanted more and more advanced games, especially since it had been several years now since the release of the many popular 8-bit home computer systems that had been flooding the market and reducing in cost. And with the Nintendo Entertainment System having just been released, the Atari 2600 was beginning to look very dated. In order to satisfy the public’s craving for games requiring increasing amounts of memory, creating a bigger game for the Atari 2600 was the only way to do it.

In order to handle the expansiveness of their games, Epyx released all three of their Olympic-based games with multiple ROM chips equaling the necessary 16K. Using bank-swapping, the various ROM chips could be accessed and swapped as needed. And all of it was embedded within a standard-sized Atari 2600 Cartridge!

Speed

As of 2000, the game (as all of the Epyx olympic game series) is completely speed throttled even for the fastest computers.

Awards

• Commodore Force
  • December 1993 (Issue 13) – #87 “Readers' Top 100”
• Computer Gamer
  • February 1986 (issue #17) - Included in the list Spectrum Collection (the best Spectrum ZX games since 1985 by editorial staff choice)
• Happy Computer
  • Issue 02/1986 - #5 Best Game in 1985 (Readers' Vote)
  • Issue 04/1987 - #8 Best Game in 1986 (Readers' Vote)

Information also contributed by SirOrlando