Track & Field review: the game that asked for your thumbs, not your brain

Your athlete crouches at the starting line. A packed audience fills the stands, and a huge scoreboard shows the world record. The gun goes off, and you start hitting two buttons, left, right, left, right, as fast as your hands can move. That is how you run in Track & Field, and it is exactly as exhausting as it sounds.

Two buttons to run, one to act

The design is almost nothing, and that is its strength. Two run buttons, hammered in turn, control your speed. A third action button handles everything else: the jump, the throw, the angle. Each event mixes those two skills in a different proportion. The 100 meter dash is pure speed. The 110 meter hurdles add timing on every jump. The long jump, javelin and high jump ask you to use the action button to set an angle, and the hammer throw is all spin and release.

There is a qualifying mark in every event, and if you miss it, you lose a life. That keeps even the simplest event tense, because the clock and the scoreboard are always watching.

Played against the mark, not the player

Up to four players can play, running in pairs, but advancing depends only on hitting the qualifying marks. Your friend beating you by a hair does not knock you out. It just embarrasses you, which in an arcade is worse. And in a strange detail, a single player uses the right set of controls, not the left, so a first-timer could easily end up hammering the wrong set of buttons.

Track & Field is the only sport where the athlete is you, your wrists and a pair of arcade buttons.

What it meant back then

Track & Field landed just ahead of the 1984 Summer Olympics, and in Japan its release even carried an official license for them. In America it arrived through Centuri and became one of the most successful arcade games of 1984. Konami and Centuri even ran a competition that year that drew more than a million players.

Every American arcade had a story about this machine. Kids hammered the run buttons so hard that later units swapped the buttons for a trackball, because so many were damaged from overuse. Everyone knew someone with a secret trick for the dash. In the bowling alley or the mall, you could hear Track & Field from across the room just from the drumming on the panel.

Playing it now

Track & Field is still loud, silly and competitive. It does not need explaining, and it is best with a friend beside you on the other controls. Pace yourself in the dash, stay calm on the angle events, and remember that the qualifying mark is the real opponent. Your forearms will remind you of 1984 by morning.