SPECIAL - KINGS OF THE BEACH

By Michael Abbot and Nana Chambers - Electronic Arts (1988) – MS-DOS

Ho scritto this little video game amarcord during the summer holidays, under the umbrella in the moments my son left me free. Holidays that now, at forty, also smell of routine and everyday life. I envy my little one who for the first time admires everything about these days, the waves that make him tumble over, immense sandcastles, and lounging on the deck chair with snacks bigger than he is. In this surreal atmosphere the video game that comes to mind, and that every year when I return home has been waiting faithfully for me for 28 years, is “Kings of the Beach”: together with a few other titles, including Sega’s immortal OutRun and Epiyx’s “Summer Games”, it is a video game that ‘makes summer’, a true status symbol for us retrogamers.

Kings of the Beach is a sports video game, initially released for MS-DOS – and it is the version I prefer, as well as the one we will talk about – and later ported to Commodore 64 and Nintendo Nes. Today, its graphics might be seen as outdated, but behind its lemon peel lies some fine pixel art work, which exudes love and attention to detail.

Appena arrivati to the options screen, after a brief intro, among other things the only part to have musical accompaniment, you are already in “craving for the sea” mode, so much so that you can feel the heavy heat on your skin. The arrangement of the options stylized as five playing fields, complete with people walking around and watching the matches, is a real pleasure and a touch of class: we can thus access the various drills to practice (spike, set, or receive), jump into a single match, great for testing our skills, or finally start the tournament.

Our alter ego will be either Sinjin Smith or Randy Stoklos – who, I am told by the production team, were two really strong players who actually existed. The beaches that will serve as the setting for our challenges are San Diego, Chicago, Waikiki, Rio de Janeiro and Sydney, and in each one we will have to play three matches. Okay, Chicago is not by the sea, but we will still have a lovely view of the lake and a nice little artificial beach.

Una vez en el campo, realizado en pseudo 3D, los cinco, todos magníficamente ricos en detalles, es fácil entrar en sintonía con el gameplay; los movimientos son los mismos de las tres pruebas de práctica. A estos se añaden las zambullidas, que se realizan automáticamente cuando nos acercamos hacia la pelota, y la finta del palmeo que, en cambio, se traduce en lanzar la pelota al campo contrario. También existe una jugada especial, (realmente inventada por Stoklos), y es el bloqueo con una sola mano, útil si vamos con retraso respecto al bloqueo clásico.

Why do I like this game? Besides its splendid atmosphere, accentuated by the time of its release, a perfect commercial move that etched this game into my memory, it is precisely this graphics style, so simple yet heavily physical, the skillful use of colors… If you close your eyes, you can almost hear the sound of the sea and smell the salty air. Then there is its splendid gameplay: while on one hand the controls are quite standard and, not caring at all about some issues due to the perspective, everything is perfectly tuned.

The moves require the right timing but are not rigid, and with the three buttons you can’t go wrong about what you want to do. Finally, but not least, the level of challenge: the AI (artificial intelligence) is damn real, every team we’ll face is tough but “human”: although it has no real weak point, it makes mistakes and recoveries, nothing different from what can happen to any player. The matches are tense, often long, with the ball flying from one side of the field to the other in a whirl of recoveries and razor-edge passes. Incredibly, this humanity extends even to the referee, who can make mistakes – and we can challenge them: a feature that is still very rare to see in sports video games today.

Closes the perfect picture of this great classic the multiplayer mode: you can play either in team-up mode, on the same team toward the tournament climb, or against each other. But it is the collaboration mode that is winning; the fun that comes from it takes the game to a new level of enjoyment.

Or maybe it’s that indefinable quality of great video games, the ones made with love: like those waves, which once seemed enormous to us and now we no longer see (but it is our legs that have grown) or like those beautiful, big snacks by the seaside that now seem to have disappeared (but it is our hands that have grown), “Kings of the Beach” in the same way has not changed, but it has changed us.

P.S. We’re linking the NES version for video game collecting purposes, although the MS-DOS one is perhaps still unsurpassed even today!