The official game of the Olympic Games, an endangered species

Until about a decade ago, the prospect of the imminent start of the Olympic Games was welcome news to video game fans eager to get their hands on new games. It will be released today, TuesdayThe Olympics go! Paris 2024The official simulation of the upcoming Paris edition, the sole beneficiary of the license granted by the International Olympic Committee, was maliciously executed. And for good reason: the game will only be available for free on mobile and PC, with no port planned for console.

The displayed content inevitably suffers from this. GraphicsThe Olympics go! Paris 2024 Poor quality, the gameplay is several years late and reeks of déjà vu, and there are only 12 sports available at launch… so it is difficult, at the moment, to imagine the success of a game published by nWay, whether respectable or commercial. This is also the continuity of the direction of the direction taken by the official players in JO: on the production line, with a lot of sports on the model and to ensure the connection of the people who have developed a similar discipline, the genre is a popular popular genre. In the last years.

From Hyper Sports to Mario & Sonic

However, in the past it has produced some good episodes. The first match to benefit from the Olympic licence Hyper Sports, released by Konami on arcades in 1984, was a huge success in Japan, so much so that it was considered one of the “1,001 Video Games You Must Have Played in Your Life” by journalist Tony Mott. After him, most Olympic Games made use of it as an official game. The IOC has notably collaborated with Sega for Beijing 2008, London 2012 or Tokyo 2020three ambitious episodes in terms of completeness of content and realism of gameplay, even if they suffer from a slight lack of capabilities.

For a while, the “official” games also suffered from comparison to another license sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee: Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games. In fact, the mustachioed plumber and the blue hedgehog, the two most iconic heroes in Japanese video games, joined forces for a few years during the Olympics, on Nintendo consoles. The excellent first episode, released during the one held in Beijing in 2008, achieved historic sales: 8 million copies were sold on the Wii and 5.10 million on the DS.

But the recipe has since run out: Mario and Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games saw its sales drop in half (3.72 million on Wii, 1.19 million on 3DS), before a significant decline in episodes Rio 2016 (0.49MB on Wii U, 0.70MB on 3DS) and Tokyo 2020 (0.9 million all consoles combined)… a sign that the audience's appetite for the Olympic brand is clearly decreasing. As for 2024, Nintendo and Sega have done nothing wrong. And unless there are any last-minute surprises, there shouldn't be Mario and Sonic For Paris…