EIDOS RELEASES ONLY OLYMPIC 2002 TITLE
Copyright 2002 www.siliconvalley.com

[ February 2nd 2002 ]

To ski like Picabo Street or Stefan Eberharter, all you need is a stout heart, fiery Olympic spirit and a good set of...thumbs. Those with zero athletic ability still can experience the rush of swishing down the treacherous slopes of the 2002 Winter Games by simply turning on the television and firing up a video game.

About a week before the Games begin on Feb. 8, software publisher Eidos Interactive will release the only officially licensed video game of the 2002 Winter Games, called Salt Lake 2002. Designed for the Sony PlayStation 2 and IBM-compatible personal computers by the British game company Attention to Detail, Salt Lake 2002 has the thrills of the Games without the torn ligaments.

It puts the player in six events from the men's Alpine downhill to the two-man bobsled. "The people who don't know Salt Lake and can't go to the Games get to see exactly what it was like," said Nigel Collier, the game's executive producer. "Even when the Olympics are finished, they can go back and play it whenever they want."

The game - which retails for between $30 and $50 - not only tries to capture the exhilaration of lifting off the men's ski jump or banging against the sides in the two-man bobsled track, it also re-creates some of the real competition venues down to the Olympic banners. Areas such as Utah Olympic Park, Deer Valley Resort and Park City Mountain Resort are detailed with every bump and undulation.

To do that, developers sent teams to Salt Lake City three times over the course of 18 months, videotaping every venue in the game. They also used satellite information and global positioning system data to reproduce each course so the moguls and dips are accurate in height to within 2 feet. And they took digital pictures of every building, gate, banner and fence to put them in the game. "It's pretty cool," said Chris Gibbs, managing director of Attention to Detail, which produced a similar video game from the Sydney 2000 Summer Games and is now working on a version for the 2004 Athens Games. "A lot of that goes over the player's head, but it's in there. It has a high degree of detail."

Programmers also turned to British winter sports athletes to record their movements so the way a skier crouches or the ski jumper sails through the air looks realistic. They do that by outfitting the person in a special suit and videotaping them on a system that can capture movement in a computer. "We actually built a ski slope in the motion capture studio. We built train tracks that we put a bobsleigh on," Collier said. "We also elevated athletes in a harness and literally made them fly through the air."

To see those aching crashes down the hill, the game has cameras placed in the same spots as those for the actual TV broadcasts, and the player can replay every tumble and twist. The designers recorded more than 10,000 phrases from two BBC commentators who make snappy remarks about what happens on screen.

What the designers could not use were real athletes' names because most of the more popular Olympians already have exclusive licensing deals for other products. But while nailing down the look and feel of the upcoming Games was important, Collier said the top priority for Salt Lake 2002 was making the game fun. "And you can experience the Olympics," he said, "without actually being there."