Back in the days when the Commodore 64 was the state-of-the-art gaming platform (we're in 1984 at this point), one of its most respected developers was a US outfit called Epyx. Us UK gamers first became aware of Epyx when Quicksilva released the innocuous-sounding Summer Games. "Yet another Track & Field clone," we surmised as we looked at the box, but it wasn't.

Summer Games was a revelation, offering a number of Olympic-style events in which the player participated not by mindlessly waggling the joystick, which was the accepted method of control in the genre, but by planning when to move it and when to press the fire button. Strategy, mate. The animation on the athletes was as fluid and sexy as melted chocolate, and with goodies such as opening and closing ceremonies, national anthems and multiplayer gameplay, Summer Games became something of a must-have. Over the following years Epyx released a whole bunch of sequels, including Winter Games, World Games, Summer Games II and California Games, as well as a platform puzzler, Impossible Mission.

All these later titles were marketed in the UK by US Gold, who ably converted them to a multiloading cassette format, but us serious gamers went out and spent £286 on a Commodore 1570 disk drive so we could avoid the vagaries of outrageous loading errors - plus the disk version retained the world records we'd set in the various events.

As the '80s drew to a close, though, Epyx seemed to have gone off the boil a bit. California Games, their most recent event 'em up, had been okay, but the formula was getting a touch too familiar. Had the company become bloated and complacent, prepared to trade indefinitely on former glories? They wouldn't have been the first...

In fact, Epyx had spent a considerable period, and a large chunk of their income - including $8 million raised in venture capital - developing a games console. This isn't something games developers normally do, but Epyx Chairman David Morse, who headed up the project, was one of the original development team behind the Amiga, so he knew a bit about the subject.