Olympic Trials

If you were designing a handheld console in the early nineties, it was practically a legal requirement to include a button-mashing sports compilation in your library. The Watara Supervision, a budget-friendly and famously clunky rival to the Game Boy, was certainly no exception. Released in 1992 and developed by Divide By Zero alongside B.I.T.S., Olympic Trials is exactly what you would expect from the title: an unashamed, heavily stripped-down homage to Konami’s arcade classic, Track & Field. It aimed to bring the blistering pace and blister-inducing gameplay of multi-event athletics to a piece of technology that could fit inside your pocket, provided your pockets were reasonably large.

The core mechanics of the game will be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever ruined a joystick in the pursuit of a digital gold medal. Success relies almost entirely on your ability to hammer the console's buttons as rapidly as humanly possible to build up speed, before tapping a directional key at the precise moment to execute an action. However, translating this arcade exertion to the Supervision presents a unique challenge. The handheld's rubbery face buttons were hardly designed for the sheer punishment of an athletic simulator, meaning a play session often feels more like a physical endurance test for your thumbs than a display of virtual sporting prowess.

Rather than just sticking to the standard track events, the developers managed to squeeze a surprisingly varied roster of six distinct disciplines into the cartridge. You begin with the Hurdles and the Long Jump, both of which are traditional tests of sheer speed and strict timing. From there, the game introduces Archery, Shot Put, Rowing, and Cycling. While the rowing and cycling events essentially boil down to more frantic, rhythmic button tapping, the archery and shot put require a bit more finesse. These events ask you to carefully judge angles and power arcs rather than just mindlessly pummelling the console, providing a brief but incredibly welcome respite for your aching hands before the next sprint begins.

Of course, discussing any Watara game requires addressing the hardware itself. The console featured a rudimentary four-shade greyscale LCD that was notorious for its incredibly slow refresh rate. For a title built entirely around speed and split-second timing, this limitation frequently becomes your greatest adversary. As your tiny, blocky athlete sprints across the screen, severe ghosting turns the moving elements into a smeared blur. Judging the exact millisecond to launch yourself over a hurdle or release a projectile becomes largely a matter of pure instinct and muscle memory, because relying on the blurry visual cues will almost certainly result in a spectacular face-plant on the track.

The audio presentation does exactly what it needs to without pushing any boundaries. You get a handful of looping, tinny chiptunes that cheerily urge you onward, accompanied by a selection of static-heavy crunches and shrill blips to signify jumps and throws. Ultimately, the entire game is built around high-score chasing. The main incentive to suffer through the sore fingers and the blurry screen is to beat the pre-set records - including a notoriously steep 50,000-point benchmark set by the default developer initials 'DBZ' - and loop through the gauntlet of events again at a progressively harsher difficulty.

Olympic Trials is hardly the sort of game you would boot up today for a deep, rewarding simulation of track and field. It is a harsh, repetitive, and visually compromised experience from top to bottom. Yet, for collectors of obscure retro technology, it remains a brilliant piece of history. It perfectly captures how developers stubbornly tried to force the manic energy of arcade sports into the absolute cheapest, most restrictive portable hardware on the market.