The Activision Decathlon

The Activision Decathlon is a sports game written by David Crane for the Atari 2600 and published by Activision in 1983. It was ported to the Atari 8-bit family, Atari 5200, Commodore 64, ColecoVision and MSX platforms. Up to four players compete in the ten different events of a real-life decathlon, either in sequence or individually.

The game became somewhat notorious for the amount of wear or damage inflicted upon console controllers, namely the Atari 2600 version where rapid back-and-forth movement of the joystick propels the athlete down the track.

The game was later reissued simply as Decathlon by the UK budget label Firebird. It was subsequently featured on the PlayStation 2 compilation Activision Anthology.