Summer Games 2 (1987): Epyx's Follow-Up That Out-Sharpened the Original

Rating band: Fan-favorite · Year: 1987 · Developer/Publisher: Epyx · Designer: Larry Clague & Michael Kosaka · Platform: DOS

Sequels to a hit sports game usually mean more events bolted onto the same skeleton, and not much else. Summer Games 2 does add 8 new events to Epyx’s already-popular Summer Games, but the more interesting change is under the hood: sharper animation across the board, and a real bump in how aggressively the computer-controlled athletes compete against you.

That aggression shift matters more than it might sound like on paper. In a lot of multi-event sports games from this era, “hard mode” just meant faster reaction windows or stricter timing. Here, the competitors themselves behave like they’re actually trying to win, not just executing a script at a higher speed. Beating them for a gold medal reads as a genuine result rather than a formality you’d expect from any sports game with a difficulty slider turned up. It’s a small distinction, but it’s the kind that separates a game people replay from one they finish once and shelve.

The animation work backs up that sense of competition. Fluid motion across 8 new events is not a trivial ask on period hardware, and Epyx clearly put real effort into making each event feel physically convincing rather than just functionally different from the last. Realism improved alongside that visual polish, but never at the expense of the game staying genuinely fun to play, which is a balance plenty of “realistic” sports titles from any era still get wrong.

What’s easy to overlook, looking at this one from a distance, is how much of Epyx’s identity in the mid-to-late 1980s was built on exactly this kind of iteration: take a format that already worked, sharpen the execution, and trust the improvements to be felt rather than advertised. Summer Games 2 doesn’t reinvent the multi-event sports genre it belongs to. It refines it, and the refinement is specific enough that longtime players still cite this as the stronger of the two Summer Games entries rather than treating it as the lesser sequel.

The multi-event sports format Epyx helped popularize with the original Summer Games became one of the defining structures of mid-1980s home computer gaming: a compilation of short, timing-and-precision events judged mostly on execution rather than any deeper simulation underneath. Summer Games 2 works entirely inside that established formula rather than trying to break out of it, and that restraint is exactly why the changes it does make stand out as clearly as they do. There’s no bigger structural shift competing for the player’s attention, so the sharper animation, the tougher competitors, and the improved sense of realism are the whole story, and they carry the sequel on their own.

That’s a genuinely rare outcome for a follow-up, and it’s part of why the game has aged as well as it has. There’s no larger narrative wrapped around the events, no unlockable meta-progression, nothing beyond the events themselves and the sharper version of a formula Epyx had already proven worked. Sometimes that’s exactly enough, and this is one of those cases.

How to run it today

Summer Games 2’s DOS release runs without complications under DOSBox, with keyboard controls mapping directly to the original event inputs. No special configuration is needed beyond mounting the game directory and launching the executable.

Compatibility: DOS (via DOSBox) · Controls: Keyboard · Setup difficulty: Low

Legal status

Epyx itself shut down in the early 1990s, but the Summer Games name had real official later life: the original Summer Games has since been reissued on a modern digital storefront. Summer Games 2 specifically hasn’t received that same treatment and isn’t sold through any current channel, which places it in the gap between an actively marketed franchise and a fully orphaned one.

If you liked this, try

Games: Summer Edition, The and Winter Games cover adjacent multi-event sports territory from the same general period, and Microsoft Decathlon is worth a look if a single, more focused athletic event lineup appeals to you more than the broader Summer Games format.