Transcript
1985
It is 1985, and somewhere a Commodore 64 is plugged into a family television.
On the screen is a new game from an American company called Epyx. It is called Winter Games, and one of its events is bobsleigh.
The screen gives you two views of the run. One is a little map of the whole course, with a red line creeping down it. The other looks into a tube of ice, curving away from you. A timer sits beside them.
The manual promises a lot. Prepare to careen down a track of solid ice, it says, in a precision-built machine of steel and aluminium, at speeds exceeding ninety miles an hour.
Its advice is simple. Steer hard. Anticipate the pull of each turn, and steer the other way. And learn the course.
You steer against the pull of each bend. Get it wrong, and the sled tumbles over.
A British magazine, Crash, reviewed the game the following spring. The tube view, it said, let you judge whether the bob was being oversteered or understeered. And if you didn’t steer the sled properly, the reviewer wrote, it tumbled over. He thought Winter Games might be the best sports game yet made.
But on several conversions, for the MSX, Spectrum and Amstrad computers, the same event played very differently. There, the view of the tube jumped from one bend to the next, almost instantly. You had no time to react. You steered by watching the map.
The same sport, the same game, fair on one computer and unfair on another.
It was an early attempt to put a sled on a screen, followed by many others. Forty years later, people are still trying.
This is Slidensa — stories of ice, gravity and speed.
Making a game out of most sports is not easy. But making one out of a sliding sport has a special problem.
In a bobsleigh, a luge or a skeleton, gravity supplies the speed. The athlete cannot pedal, or kick, or run faster down the track. And the skill that wins the race is almost invisible. Television barely shows it.
So that is the question for this episode.
How do you make a game from a sport where gravity supplies the speed, and expert control is almost invisible?
And a second question inside it: what must a player be able to earn, and to lose, for a run to feel driven rather than watched?
First, a confession about the title. It is deliberately unfair. Not every game got the same thing wrong. Several solved one part of the problem brilliantly. And this is a sample of games, studied closely, not a list of every sliding game ever made.
But across forty years, the same three difficulties keep coming back. And the games that tripped over them tell us a lot about the sport itself.
What control means
Start with what a real slider actually does.
Episode three of this series looked at how a sled with no steering wheel is steered. A bobsleigh pilot pulls on ropes. A luge rider presses the curved front of the runners with the calves, and shifts the shoulders. A skeleton rider, head first, moves weight and body by tiny amounts.
Episode four followed the riders who lay down head first. Episode six, the ones who went feet first and lay back. And episode eight asked why ice is slippery at all, and why the friction under a runner refuses to be one simple number.
Put those together, and you get a picture of skill that is very hard to show.
An athlete chooses a line early, often well before the bend. Then they hold that line with movements so small that you would struggle to see them from the side of the track, let alone on television. A good run and a bad run can look almost identical. The difference turns up on the clock, in hundredths of a second.
Television makes this worse. A camera beside the track sees a sled flash past for a second or two. A camera on the sled sees walls rushing by. Neither shows the pressure of a calf on a runner, or the moment a pilot eases a rope. What the viewer gets is speed, and a time.
Now try to put that into a game.
A game player usually has a few buttons, or a stick, or a keyboard. A screen that shows the track from one point of view. And a reasonable wish to feel that what they do matters.
So every sliding game has to make three choices.
What happens when the player makes a mistake?
How much can the player actually change, once gravity takes over?
And how do you make a bobsleigh feel different from a luge, or a skeleton, when all three are sleds going down the same ice?
Those are the three problems. Let’s take them one at a time.
Consequence
The first problem is consequence. What happens when you get it wrong?
In Winter Games, in 1985, the answer was simple. Steer badly, and the sled tumbled. That was the main way to fail.
The game was converted for many machines, and reviewers kept finding the same thing. The Video Game Critic, a long-running American review site, played the version for the Nintendo Entertainment System and was not impressed. When the sled begins sliding up one side of the pipe, he wrote, just push the other way, to stop it tipping over.
The versions did differ in how hard they punished you. On the PC version, the writer who compared them all found that you had to tap the keys rapidly, or you would be on your side before the second turn. On the Amiga and Atari ST, he wrote, the forces acted more violently.
On the Atari 7800, the Video Game Critic was kinder, but said the same. There really isn’t much to it, he wrote. You steer against the turns, so the sled doesn’t tip over.
A few years later, a British game called Winter Olympiad 88 gave its bobsleigh a timing window. According to a fans’ wiki, steer too early and you lost speed; steer too late, and you were thrown over. A crash, the wiki adds, was counted as four minutes.
The Video Game Critic was not won over by Winter Olympiad either. The bobsled, he wrote, was positively yawn-inducing. The course felt six hundred miles long, and the thought of running three heats was nauseating.
Fast forward to 1994, and an official game of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics, from the British publisher U.S. Gold.
Its manual contains one of the loveliest ideas in any sliding game. Watch the head of the man at the front of your bob, it says. If the front man’s head is pointing straight ahead, you are on the best line. If it points somewhere else, steer that way.
The body tells you the line. That is very close to how sliding feels.
The same game also made the start matter. You pushed by moving the joystick from left to right and back, and pressed a button to make each runner jump in. Every member of the crew had to be aboard by the end of the run-in. If they weren’t, you were disqualified.
But it had a weakness too. In an undated retrospective review, the Video Game Critic found the bob and luge entirely too easy to flip over, as you crept up the banked turns. On the handheld version, he noted, your control was limited to slight adjustments.
Not every game was all or nothing. The 1987 game Bobsleigh, which episode two of this series explored, took a middle road. After the push, speed built up by itself, and mistakes cost some of it. Carry too much roll out of a bend, and the sled bounced off the wall, or crashed. A mistake could be small, or it could be the end. Reviewers loved it. Crash gave it eighty-eight percent.
Then came 1998, and the Winter Olympics in Nagano, in Japan. The official game, from Konami, came out on several machines.
It had moments of real drama. Its luge, seen through the rider’s own eyes, was a frightening ride. But in Nagano, a flip meant instant disqualification.
Within days, the same reviewer at the website GameSpot, Josh Smith, reviewed a rival from Sega, called Winter Heat. In Winter Heat, he noted, if you flipped over, you could get back on and carry on. Unlike in Nagano, where you were instantly disqualified.
Bored thumbs rejoice, he wrote.
And in 2006, at the opposite extreme, the official game of the Turin Winter Olympics. Jim Rossignol, at GamesRadar, found its sliding events the most intense part of the game. He called them variants of extreme tobogganing, the kind you catch ten minutes of on television every four years.
But a reviewer at the website TweakTown, Simon Hutchinson, found something surprising about its bobsleigh and luge. It was impossible to crash at all. That, he wrote, took the complete challenge out of the event.
He also noticed a trade-off. The view from inside the sled brought home the true terror of the luge, he wrote. But a view from behind would have made the game much easier.
So across the years, there are two extremes. A sled that is perfectly fine until, suddenly, it tips over and the run is gone. And a sled that cannot fail at all.
Tipping over is not itself a mistake. Real sleds do tip over. The question is what happens before that. Do smaller mistakes cost anything? Or is it all, or nothing?
Slidensa, the game we make, answers with a ladder.
An ordinary slip, where the sled slides back down the wall as it leaves a bend, takes six percent of its speed, and the run goes on. If that slip comes after more than a second and a half without a left or right input, the penalty becomes forty percent.
Climb too high as the sled leaves a bend, and it tips over. Go over the lip of the track, and it crashes. Either way, the run is over, and no time is recorded.
Under the default rule, brake for a tenth of a second before the finish, and the run is disqualified. And like Lillehammer, our game makes the start count: fail to board in time, and the run is void.
So there is a step between perfect and disaster. And then another step.
Agency
The second problem is agency. Once gravity takes over, how much can the player actually change?
Some games tried hard to give the player a job.
In 1988, Epyx followed Winter Games with The Games: Winter Edition. Its luge came with real advice in the manual. Steer to the inside of each curve, for the shortest distance. Keep dead centre on the straights, so you don’t drift. Stay away from the sides: bounce off them, and you lose critical time. Steering, it warned, is very sensitive. You learn to go with the flow of the track.
The British magazine Sinclair User called it always good for a laugh, and could not resist a joke on the way in. You want the luge, it wrote? You should have thought of that before you came out.
That was the line paying off: a shorter route, a cleaner run, a better time.
But in other games, the player’s job shrank.
Here is Josh Smith again, on the PlayStation version of Nagano. You don’t even steer around corners, he wrote.
On the Nintendo 64 version, he found a little more to do: shifting the crew’s weight, and remembering the two places on the course where you had to brake. But overall, he said, the sleds were about as tough as answering a phone when it rings.
Four years later came the official game of the 2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City. Its only sliding event was the two-man bobsleigh. And it had a genuinely good idea in it.
It was played from inside the sled, in first person, four years before Turin did the same. The reviewer Gord Goble, at GameSpot, explained the good idea. The sleds sweep up the near vertical bank of a curve, but only as far as their speed allows. That is one thing a real sled does.
The trouble was what was left for the player. It was, Goble wrote, a completely predetermined course. You merely steered a few inches this way or that.
But he added something fair. One brush against the wall, he noted, could still decide a medal. Predetermined did not mean that nothing mattered. It meant that very little did.
Back in 1991, an American publisher called Accolade had released The Games: Winter Challenge. Its publisher’s advertisement promised the most realistic simulation of its kind. Its manual had a gift for describing the sport. The luge, it said, was for a slider willing to take curves at sixty miles an hour, lying belly up, feet first, and blind. This event, it added, is truly a sport for the deranged. And of the bobsleigh: this ain’t no roller coaster, this is a shooting star.
It also tried to show the line. When you see ice spray up from the steel runners, the manual said, move the sled left or right to find the best position. A Video Game Critic review found the same cue a mystery. It was hard to tell, he wrote, when the game wanted you in the centre of the tube, and when up on the sides. Its luge and bobsleigh ran down tubes of ice. The goal, the magazine Computer Gaming World explained, was to gain speed and keep the vehicle in the groove. The reviewer thought the sled events less difficult than the rest of the game.
That game also hid a strange secret. A computer scientist took its code apart in 2025, and found hidden copy-protection checks. When one failed, the bob gained drag after the first turns. And a luge run below fifty-seven point seven seconds was forfeited near the finish. Even the two official releases he tested failed the check.
For years, players may have wondered why a fast luge run vanished near the line.
There is one more pattern here. Many of the games we looked at turned the push start into a game of its own.
In the 1988 luge, you had thirty seconds to launch. You held a button to grab the handles, rocked forward and back, let go, and then tapped to dig in the spiked gloves. In Lillehammer, you rocked the luge back and forth with the joystick. In Winter Gold, you rocked a meter on the screen to gain speed at the gate. It makes sense. The push is the one moment in the real sport where effort turns directly into speed. After that, gravity is in charge.
Other games went a different way, and gave the player things to earn that real sliding doesn’t have.
In Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, from 2009, the bobsleigh course has an ideal line. Stay on it, and you get a burst of speed. Stay on it longer, and the burst grows. Hit the walls, and you lose speed. In its dream events, you hit dash panels, and dodge spikes and other obstacles. In the 2014 sequel, the skeleton’s boost line even gets smaller as the run goes on, so the reward gets harder to earn.
A mobile party game made for the 2022 Winter Olympics turned skeleton into a race with power-ups. And a game released on the Steam store in 2023, called BobsleighX, offers fifteen courses, including jumps and obstacles. It has five sleds with different mass, centre of gravity and control range. And it has, in its makers’ words, a TV broadcast replay. Those are the makers’ claims. They show what the game aims for, not how it plays.
That is one honest answer to the agency problem: invent new ways to earn speed. It makes a game more lively. It also makes it less like the sport.
So what can a player earn, after the push, without inventing anything?
In Slidensa, the answer comes from the same physics as the real sport. Once the crew are aboard, nothing the player does can add speed. Gravity supplies it all. What the player can do is lose less of it.
They can take a shorter line. They can avoid climbing higher on the wall than the bend needs. They can keep the runners from skidding. And they can avoid forcing the sled below its natural line, which also costs time.
How big is that difference? Take the game’s model of the track at Igls. A run with no steering at all, after a good push, finishes about three and a half to four seconds behind the game’s own autopilot. And on the way down, it slips at least once.
The push matters too. Press the steps too slowly, and the start alone can cost up to about a second.
So in this game, a run is not watched. It is driven, by losing as little as possible of what gravity gives.
Distinction
The third problem is distinction. How do you make three sleds feel like three sports?
In real life, they are very different. A bobsleigh is a heavy machine with a crew and a pilot pulling ropes. A luge rider lies on their back, feet first, and steers with calves and shoulders. A skeleton rider lies on their front, head first, on a sled with no conventional steering mechanism. The rider guides it with small shifts of body and pressure.
In games, that difference has been hard to keep.
This problem goes back to the beginning. Winter Games had a version for the Atari 2600, an older and simpler console. It was the only version with a luge. A long series of articles on the game, by a writer who compared every version, called that luge basically a copy of the bobsled.
Take Winter Gold, a game for the Super Nintendo in 1996. Its manual describes the bobsled as similar to the luge, and the luge as similar to the bobsled. And it gives both the same controls, word for word: keep the sled on the middle line, because hitting the side rails will slow you down.
It does have one good line about the luge, though. Pronounced looj, the manual says, not loogey.
Then Turin, in 2006, again. The Sydney Morning Herald’s reviewer, Eliot Fish, found its luge and bobsleigh almost identical. They shared a track, and another reviewer said the main difference was what the vehicle looked like.
It did have one comic touch. One critic noted the commentators during a bob run. Touches the edge, says one. Slightly touches the edge.
And Fish summed up the experience in one line. It was, he wrote, about as exciting as lying in an empty bath, and pretending it’s the luge.
The same German studio, 49Games, went on to make a game called Winter Sports: The Ultimate Challenge, released in 2007. Reviewing it, Brad Hilderbrand at the website Worthplaying found that skeleton and luge looked and felt exactly the same as bobsleigh. Only, he wrote, with fewer people riding.
And in 2010, the official game of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, from Sega, offered all three sliding sports. Tom Orry, at the website VideoGamer, called them essentially the same event in slightly different sets of clothing.
Here is the interesting part. Another reviewer of the same game, writing on a smaller website, said that each sliding event had its own physics. Both reviewers may have been right. Three sleds can be built differently, and still feel the same in the hands.
The problem did not go away. A game called Winter Games 2023, released in 2022, had skeleton and bobsleigh. One reviewer at the website Gamecell noticed that the bobsleigh had the same controls as the skeleton. Are you detecting a theme here, the reviewer asked? The same reviewer said he won a two-heat skeleton race by thirty-two seconds. Another reviewer found the two events sliding down the same chute.
And yet the Video Game Critic loved the speed of those same events: a breakneck sense of speed, he wrote, punctuated by blur and vibration.
And that is the hardest part of the problem. It is not enough for sleds to be different inside the game. A player has to feel the difference.
Slidensa has four sleds: the two-man and four-man bobsleighs, the luge and the skeleton. In its simulation, each is tuned differently.
The luge answers the player’s steering the quickest, and skids the least. The skeleton answers the slowest, skids the most, and meets the most air resistance. The four-man bob has the strongest push, and steers a little more slowly than the two-man.
All four use the same three commands: left, straight, or right. But each sled takes up a command, and lets it go, at its own speed. The luge responds in about a tenth of a second. The skeleton takes longer.
That is how the four are tuned. Whether four tunings become four clearly different sensations is the test still to come.
What the best games solved
So far, this episode has mostly listed difficulties. It is only fair to list the solutions too, because almost every game in this story got something right.
Winter Games, in 1985, paired its tube view with a map that let you see a bend coming. On the original version, that gave you a reason to look ahead, which is exactly what a real pilot does.
Lillehammer ‘94 had the front man’s head, perhaps the most elegant line cue in any sliding game. And it made the start matter, by disqualifying a crew that failed to board.
Winter Heat, in 1998, let a fallen rider climb back on. It turned a crash from the end of everything into a costly mistake. And the same reviewer who called Nagano passive praised the speed of its bobsleigh and skeleton.
Salt Lake 2002 modelled something real: a sled climbing the wall only as high as its speed allowed. And it made a single brush with the wall cost time.
Torino 2006 may have been impossible to crash, but its first-person view impressed people. The GamesRadar reviewer, Jim Rossignol, described the terrifying jolting of the ride, and meant it as praise. It was, he wrote, superbly delivered.
Even Vancouver 2010, for all its sameness, earned a concession from Tom Orry. Bank the corners just right, he conceded, and the game portrayed that speed fairly well.
And there were braver experiments. In Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, from 2009, you could hold the Wii controller to your chest and lean, to steer, like a real slider. A reviewer at the website Nintendo Life found it unnecessary. But it was an attempt to put the body back into the sport.
Sound mattered too. Looking back at Lillehammer in 2006, Adam King at the website Sega-16 gave it a poor score overall. But he praised one detail: the ice trickling off the blades of your bobsled.
Even an otherwise weak game could get the feeling right. Reviewing the Mario and Sonic game of 2014, the Video Game Critic found its bobsleigh and skeleton conveyed a palpable sense of momentum. He loved, he wrote, the sound of grinding ice coming from the controller.
There is one more voice worth hearing.
In February 2026, someone reviewed a mobile sliding game called Sleigh Champion, which had been released years earlier. The reviewer described themselves as a junior luge athlete. The game, they wrote, felt kind of accurate, which was better than they had expected. If that description is accurate, it is a compliment from someone who knows what a turn feels like.
They also asked for real tracks: Park City, Lake Placid, Sigulda, Oberhof.
Then they wrote the developers a short coaching sheet.
First, add crashing. If you go into a turn too early, or come out too late, you could flip. Second, if you go into a turn too late, you should loop in the turn. Third, the sled should ping-pong between the walls. And fourth, the steering should get firmer, firmer, firmer, and then stop.
It is the clearest first-person wish list in this story, and a list of what games tend to leave out. Mistakes with consequences. A turn that punishes you for being late. Walls that hit back. And control that builds, then releases.
Some of the best answers came from outside sliding altogether.
Racing games built around a single fixed course, run again and again against the clock, faced a similar problem. A French series called Trackmania solved part of it with ghosts and medals. Players race recorded ghosts, and a track author’s own validation run sets an author time to beat. The game even has curved ice sections it calls bobsleigh.
A rhythm game called Thumper, from 2016, sends a beetle down a fixed track at terrifying speed. Its bends are visible ahead, and its makers added an optional bonus for a perfectly timed turn. The fixed view lets the player read the next cue before it arrives.
Neither is a sliding game. But both show the same lesson as the map beside the tube in 1985. Speed is only fun if the player can see what is coming, and feel what they did.
What Slidensa still can’t prove
Our game has a few things of its own to add to that list.
Its track is not invented. The one track in the game today is a model of the real track at Igls, in Austria, built from map and elevation data. Of all the games looked at for this episode, none was documented as using a real track’s shape. Even the 1987 game, Bobsleigh, from episode two of this series, kept the real tracks’ number of bends, on much gentler courses.
And a best time in Slidensa is replay-checked. The game records the inputs and the version of its physics, then runs them again. If the clock or the split times do not come out the same, it refuses the record. A valid best can ride beside the player as a ghost.
But it would be easy to end this episode by saying that our game has solved everything. It hasn’t.
Here is what the current build cannot yet prove.
First, the one you have already heard. The four sleds are tuned differently, but nobody has yet tested whether players clearly feel those differences.
Second, the spread of real human skill. The game has an autopilot. Its next medal sits two tenths of a second behind it. Another sits half a second behind, and bronze a full second behind. Those are design targets, not evidence from real players. On an earlier build, a simulated controller labelled a first-timer finished roughly one and a half to two seconds behind. The pushed start has changed since then, and the test has not been run again.
Third, the line. The game can show an ideal line on the track, as an option. But that line is a guide. It has not been proved to be the fastest possible way down.
And there is a bigger limit, which episode eight described. In Slidensa, the ice itself never changes. Each sled has a fixed friction coefficient. It does not change with temperature, load or the condition of the ice. Real ice is not like that.
None of that is a failure. It is what any honest attempt at this problem looks like, partway through.
The map beside the tube
So, how do you make a game from a sport where gravity supplies the speed, and the skill is almost invisible?
Forty years of games suggest a few answers.
Give the player something to lose at every bend, not just at the end. A slip, a knock, a loss of speed, before the crash.
Make the push matter, but don’t let the push be the whole game.
Be careful with invented rewards. Boosts and power-ups make a lively game, but the real sport has none. The more honest reward is time: a cleaner line, a lower climb on the wall, a run that loses less.
Show the line, somehow. A map that lets you see the bend coming. A front man’s head that points the right way.
And make three sleds feel like three sports, not one sled in three costumes.
And remember that the player cannot feel the ice. They feel a screen, a sound, and their own hands. Everything a slider feels through their body has to arrive through those three things.
The title of this episode was unfair. These were not universal mistakes. They were recurring compromises, made on very different machines and often inside multi-event packages, for a sport that hides its own skill.
Go back to 1985, and that Commodore 64. A little red line creeping down a map, and a tube of ice beside it.
Even then, someone understood one important thing. A slider needs to see the bend before it arrives.
Sources, a transcript and the project are at slidensa.com.
Slidensa is an independent game about bobsleigh, luge and skeleton.