Yesterday, we reported on a claim that the International Olympics Committee had dropped Mario’s and Sonic’s sports franchise. Sadly, we can now confirm that this is true.
Eurogamer reports that they were able to interview Lee Cocker, who first broke the news himself on Twitter. Eurogamer seems to have verified, as Cocker had shared evidence to confirm, that he was personally involved in making every title in the Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games franchise.
As Eurogamer states, Cocker got into his enviable position because he had previously worked for ISM Ltd. ISM Ltd. handled the video game license for the Olympics, but as we now know, that’s all changed.
This is what Cocker told Eurogamer:
“They wanted to look at other partners and NFTs and esports. Basically the IOC wanted to bring [it] back to themselves internally and look at other partners so they would get more money.”
Eurogamer also found that nWay has made new Olympics games for mobile, and are making new Olympics NFTs. But just to be clear, we should have known about this two years ago and the news simply hadn’t come out. There was already no Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games title for the 2022 Winter Olympics held in Beijing.
Eurogamer also pointed out that the International Olympics Committee flubbed in trying to bring video games in as a new category at that Beijing event, but are now preparing for their first proper Esports Olympics Games in Saudi Arabia in 2025.
Between mobile, NFTs, and Saudi Arabia, this is all as far away from Mario and Sonic as it can get. But we must admit that it’s easy to see that the International Olympics Committee doesn’t need to care about classic video games, or their own games being classics.
We had already mulled on the possibility of Mario and Sonic meeting in a completely different crossover video game someday, and maybe the end of this chapter, as well as the looming debut of Nintendo’s next console, will open up new opportunities for this to happen. It would all depend on whether Nintendo or Sega finds inspiration on how to make this work, perhaps from that new console itself.
But if you are one of those retro gamers, you know that we never needed the Olympics license to play Olympics quality sports games. The famous Data East title Track & Field actually ditched its original licensed name, Hyper Olympic, when it left Japan. Many subsequent Track & Field games came with and without the Olympics license through the years.
Other such games with an Olympics theme but no official license, include Bandai’s infamous NES rarity, Stadium Events, AM3’s DecAthlete for the Sega Saturn, and the truly strange hidden gem, the futuristic Numan Athletics games, made by Namco for arcades.
But of course, if the International Olympics Committee really cared about having a video game presence just a little bit, they would have gotten on board with developers like EA or 2K Sports at some point in the last 40 years. The Olympics would have been a semi-annual licensed video game franchise, possibly as popular a sports brand as NBA or FIFA.
