Good afternoon, today I'd like to talk about one of the arcade games I've played on my Nintendo or in arcade machines. I'm referring to 88 Games. This sports game was developed and published by Konami in 1988, when I was 12 years old. It's part of the Track & Field series and was released under different names depending on the region: Konami '88 in Europe, '88 Games in North America, and Hyper Sports Special in Japan.

The game was inspired by the 1988 Summer Olympics held in Seoul, South Korea, although it is not officially licensed by the event. As the successor to Track & Field (1983) and Hyper Sports (1984), '88 Games introduced graphical improvements and a greater variety of events, consolidating the arcade sports competition formula that characterized the series.

And I'm very fond of this game from playing it so many times with my little sister. I don't know how she did it, but she beat me most of the time. The game allows up to four players in competitive mode, encouraging interaction and direct competition.

The tests you had to complete to earn the gold medal were:

• 100-meter dash

• Long jump

• 400-meter relay (heating)

• Skeet shooting

• 110-meter hurdles

• Archery

• Javelin throw

• High jump

The end and the future

SEGA and the arcade were an important part of the genesis of video games. Today, both are experiencing difficult times while new business models flourish. Players' tastes and needs changed until things like the personal interaction and camaraderie of arcades became irrelevant or were replaced by islands of online communities. The rise of online gaming and games as a service promise to be the closest thing to a successor model, a system where users constantly invest in an experience; the developer provides the infrastructure, and the operator becomes things like Steam or Google Play.

The people who made SEGA's arcade revolution possible were in the right place at the right time, as given the current circumstances, it's a job that will be difficult to see again. Today, visionaries like Yu Suzuki no longer have the same freedom to take creative or hardware risks to create innovative, risky, and adventurous games, key factors in SEGA's rise and, ironically, also in its decline. SEGA's participation in the video game world is increasingly distant from the four revolutions it led in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 2000s; however, it is a company that has proven to be flexible in the face of various situations, for better or worse.

That's all for today. I hope you like this post as much as I liked writing it.