Winter Gold

Winter Gold is a winter sports game where players can choose between six disciplines such as downhill, ski jumping, snowboarding, aerial skiing, bobsled, and luge across four distinct olympic venues: Salt Lake City, Lillehammer, Albertville, and an unlockable city, Nagano. Prior to starting the game, players choose the color of their gear (suit, helmet, and boots) and nationality.

The three gameplay modes are Practice, Competition, and Circuit. In both practice and competition modes, players can choose an opponent and a few disciplines or just one discipline to participate in order to obtain the best possible time record or score, which are saved automatically via the cartridge's internal battery-backed memory. In circuit mode, the player can also participate on any discipline but must compete against other participants. The player advances into the next olympic venue by reaching the top three positions depending on the time rankings or standing points obtained after finishing each discipline. Multiplayer mode lets up to eight players compete.

Winter Gold was developed by Funcom and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in November 1996. The game was housed in a 16-megabit (2 MB) cartridge using the Super FX2 enhancement chip, a revision of the Super FX processor developed by Argonaut Software that was previously used in Doom and Yoshi's Island. 4 MHz, with extra pins soldered in the PCB to increase the supported ROM size and framebuffer. Olav Mørkrid, who previously worked on Daze Before Christmas, served as lead programmer.

Lead graphic artist Rune Spaans, who was hired by Funcom in 1994, was in charge of the 3D models, and co-programmers Frank Stevenson and Paul Endre Endresen were responsible for the 3D tracing and physics respectively. Additional artwork was handled by Daniel Staver and Dennis Hansen. Mørkrid and Spaans recounted the project's development process and history in a 2018 interview and on Spaans's personal website.

Winter Gold received mixed critical reception. Hobby Consolas's Roberto Lorente praised the fast-paced polygon graphics, sound design, playability, and fun factor but found the color palette as not very flashy. Total!'s Frederic Berg commended the gameplay, polygon visuals, techno-style music, and sound design but criticized the lack of replay value.

MAN!AC's Martin Gaksch gave positive remarks to the funky presentation, interesting 3D polygon visuals, and fast pacing of each discipline but was mixed regarding sound and criticized the poor color palette with the same sentiment as Lorente, and the letterboxed resolution. Video Games' Thomas Wiesner regarded the fast-paced 3D graphics as very impressive for Super NES standards, innovations of each discipline, controls, music, and sound design but, like Berg, he criticized the lack of gameplay variety in Winter Gold outside of improving personal time records and competing against AI opponents. In a similar way as Lorente and Gaksch, Mega Fun's Christoph Pütz criticized the lack of colors but commended the soundtrack.