Dolphin Olympics

Two minutes, one dolphin, and a stretch of open ocean. Dolphin Olympics looks at first like a simple trick game — press up to swim, press down to spin — but the thing it is really testing is whether you can leave the water and get back into it without losing any speed. Everything else follows from that. Alan Rawkins built it in 2006, and it remains one of the purest momentum games the Flash era produced.

Momentum Is the Whole Game

Your dolphin has no fixed speed. It has whatever speed you have managed to accumulate, and the ocean is constantly trying to take it back. Holding up accelerates, but far more speed comes from diving deep and swinging back up in a long arc, using the descent to build the launch. Get that right and you break the surface fast enough to go properly airborne.

The re-entry is where runs are won and lost. Come down nose-first at a shallow angle and you slice into the water and keep almost everything you built. Land flat, sideways, or backwards and the water kills your speed instantly, and you spend the next fifteen seconds climbing back to where you were. A good run is a rhythm: dive, arc, launch, trick, clean entry, dive again — each cycle a little faster than the last.

Scoring the Tricks

Points come from completed rotations and from the quality of your landing. Left and right tilt the dolphin so it flips forwards or backwards, and down puts it into a corkscrew. Each full rotation banks points, and stringing several different rotations into one jump is worth considerably more than repeating the same one. A clean re-entry after the trick adds a bonus on top.

The trap is greed. Tricks cost you control, and a jump you spend spinning is a jump you are not aiming. Early in a run, when your jumps are small, the sensible play is to take almost no tricks at all and concentrate entirely on speed. Once you are launching high enough to have two or three seconds of air, that is when the rotations pay for themselves.

Controls

Up accelerates, left and right tilt the dolphin into front and back flips, and down triggers a corkscrew. Tilting also steers you in the air, so the same keys that spin you are the ones you use to line up a landing.

Building a Long Run

• Spend the opening thirty seconds doing nothing but diving and surfacing. Speed compounds, and points earned late in a fast run dwarf anything you can scrape together early.
• Aim for a nose-down entry every single time, even if it means cutting a rotation short. A landed single flip beats an unlanded triple.
• Use the depth. The deeper you start your upward arc, the longer you have to build velocity before you hit the surface.
• Chase the fish. They are scattered around the water and add to your total, and the ones near the surface are usually on the way to somewhere you were going anyway.
• Watch the clock, not the score. With ten seconds left there is no reason to preserve momentum, so throw everything into one final launch.

Why It Still Plays Well

There are no levels, no unlocks, and no progression system — just a timer and a number. That makes it an unusually honest skill game. The first time you play you will score a few thousand points and think there is not much to it. After a dozen runs you will be reading the swell, setting up dives before you have even landed the last jump, and hitting totals an order of magnitude higher with exactly the same four keys. The gap between those two players is all technique, which is a rare and satisfying thing in a game this small.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long is a run in Dolphin Olympics? Each attempt lasts two minutes, and the timer keeps going whether you are underwater, airborne, or drifting.

Why do I keep losing all my speed when I land? You are almost certainly entering the water at the wrong angle. Tilt the dolphin so it is pointing downward and roughly in line with its direction of travel before it touches the surface.

What is the difference between a flip and a corkscrew? Flips are forward or backward rotations triggered with the left and right arrows. The corkscrew is a barrel roll along the dolphin's long axis, triggered with the down arrow, and it scores separately from flips.

Do the fish do anything besides add points? They are there to be chased and collected for score. Working them into your route is free value, but they are not required to progress.

Should I be doing tricks on every jump? No. Small jumps are better spent building speed. Save rotations for launches high enough that you can finish them and still set up a clean landing.

Who developed Dolphin Olympics? Alan Rawkins released it in August 2006 as a browser game.