Ultimate Olympic Decathlon

Five events, one keyboard, and no subtlety whatsoever. This is the genre that wore out a generation of joysticks: alternate Z and X as fast as your hands will go, and hold Space to aim.

Sprinting (100m) is pure hand speed. Javelin wants a fast run-up and then a release as close to 45 degrees as you can manage on the sweeping gauge — cross the foul line still holding Space and the throw is scratched. Discus is a rhythm event: tap on the beat to wind up the spin, and the metronome gets faster the longer you stay with it. Long Run (800m) inverts everything — mash here and you will blow up and crawl home, so hold a steady pace in the green band and save the mashing for the last hundred metres. Weightlifting is two stages: furious mashing to get the bar overhead, then three seconds of holding it steady with Z and X before it counts.

Play any event on its own, or take on the Full Decathlon for a combined score and a place on the leaderboard.

THE ONE RULE: ALTERNATE

Every tap of Z or X adds speed or power, but only if it’s a different key from the last one. Hit the same key twice in a row and the tap counts for a third of its value, and you hear a dull thud instead of a click. Two fingers alternating will always beat one finger going as fast as it can. On a phone, use both thumbs on the two buttons.

EVENT BY EVENT

SPRINTING (100M)

Wait for the gun. If you press anything before GO! it’s a false start, and the starter makes you go back to your marks and wait again. Once you’re away, your top speed depends only on how fast you tap. Air resistance grows with the square of your speed, so the faster you go, the harder it is to go faster still. About six taps a second gets you home in around seventeen seconds. Ten a second gets you to about eleven. The fastest tappers get close to the track’s top speed of 13 metres a second. There’s no stamina in this event, so give it everything from the gun.

JAVELIN

Mash Z and X down the runway to build speed, then press and hold Space. That fixes your speed, starts the throwing arm and sets a needle sweeping across the angle gauge. Let go of Space to throw. The distance depends on the run-up speed and on how close the needle is to 45 degrees. While you’re aiming you keep drifting toward the foul line, and if you cross it before you let go, the throw counts for nothing.

Tip: the needle starts at 45 degrees. A quick, firm press and release of Space, made while you’re at full speed and still well short of the line, is the most reliable throw in the game.

DISCUS

A metronome ticks, and a tap counts if it lands in the window around each beat. A tap dead on the beat is PERFECT and adds the most power. A tap slightly off is GOOD. A tap well off is LATE, and a beat with no tap at all is a MISS. Both cost you power. The beat gets faster every time it ticks, so the longer you stay with it, the harder it gets. When you have the power you want, hold Space to start the release gauge, and let go near 45 degrees, as with the javelin.

Tip: don’t go too soon. A dozen or so perfect beats fill the power bar, and a missed beat late in the run only costs you a little. Stay with the beat as long as you can keep up, then throw.

LONG RUN (800M)

This is the event that catches out people who’ve learned to mash. The stamina bar has a green band. Tap at a steady three to five taps a second and you stay in it, and your stamina slowly refills. Go faster than that and your stamina drains quickly. If it runs out completely you slow to a crawl, and you’ll watch the field go past you.

In the last 80 metres the progress bar turns red and FINAL SPRINT! comes up. From there, going flat out costs less than half as much stamina as before, and you run faster for the same effort. That’s when to mash.

WEIGHTLIFTING

You have seven seconds to mash the bar overhead, and it sinks if you stop. Once it’s up, the bar starts to tip one way or the other, and you have three seconds to keep it level: Z pushes it one way and X the other. Small, quick corrections work better than big ones. Let it tip too far and the lift fails and scores nothing.

SCORING

Each event turns your time, distance or weight into points, roughly the way a real decathlon does: a good arcade performance is worth around 900 to 1,100 points. The Full Decathlon runs all five events in a row: sprint, javelin, discus, 800m and the lift. It adds up the total, and the best five totals are kept on a leaderboard in your browser.

BEHIND THE GAME

This was the first 16-bit game on the site, after a run of ZX Spectrum games. It runs at 384×288 at a fixed sixty frames a second, with a richer palette than the Spectrum’s and a driving soundtrack of bass, stabs and drums that owes more to the Sega Mega Drive than to a beeper.

The athletes aren’t sprite sheets. Each one is a little skeleton of hips, shoulders and two-part arms and legs, drawn as chunky square-ended limbs and posed in code. That’s how the same figure can sprint, crouch at the blocks, wind up a javelin, spin for the discus and squat under a bar without anyone drawing those frames by hand. The discus spin is faked by squashing the figure sideways in time with the beat.