Winter Games is a sports video game developed by Epyx (and released in Europe by U.S. Gold), based on sports featured in the Winter Olympic Games. A snow-and-ice themed follow-up to the highly successful Summer Games, Winter Games was released in 1985 for the Commodore 64 and later ported to several popular home computers and video game consoles of the 1980s. The game was presented as a virtual multi-sport carnival called the "Epyx Winter Games" (there was no official IOC licensing in place) with up to 8 players each choosing a country to represent, and then taking turns competing in various events to try for a medal. Events The events available vary slightly depending on the platform, but include some or all of the following: Slalom skiing Ski jumping Biathlon Bobsled Figure skating Speed skating Luge Freestyle skiing; more precisely, the aerial skiing discipline, called "Hot Dog Aerials" in the game Free skating The game allowed you to compete in all of the events sequentially, choose a few events, choose just one event, or practice an event. Ports Winter Games was ported to the Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Apple Macintosh, Apple IIGS, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, and IBM PC computer platforms, and to the Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Family Computer Disk System video game consoles. In 2004, it was featured as one of the games on the C64 Direct-to-TV. A Virtual Console version was released in Europe on February 20, 2009. Reception Winter Games was Epyx's best-selling Commodore game as of late 1987. Its sales had surpassed 250,000 copies by November 1989. Info rated Winter Games four-plus stars out of five, stating that each event was good enough to be sold separately, and concluding that it was "Sports simulation at its best!". In 1985, Zzap!64 gave 94% for the game calling it "another classic sport simulation from Epyx". Lemon64 website users have given average vote of 8.6 which places the game on top 20 list on the site. The game was reviewed in 1988 in Dragon #132 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the game 3½ out of 5 stars. The Spectrum version topped the charts for the month of April. However, the NES and Famicom Disk System versions were critically panned for unresponsive controls, abysmal music and poor graphics. The Angry Video Game Nerd