Commodore 64: My Early Days of Gaming

Ahhh, the Commodore 64. Anybody over the age of about 25 should hopefully remember that name with fondness. When I was about five or six years old this was the computer which first introduced me to the wonders of technology, and how far we'd advanced since the early days of hitting rocks against other rocks to make sparks for our entertainment. Utilising the awesome power of an 8 Bit processor, 64k of Ram, able to display 16 colors, and containing the first sound synthesizer chip to be built into a personal computer, the C64 was an absolute beast.

My older brother, Bruce, was the person in our family who originally had a C64. I was incredibly envious, and used to eagerly watch the screen from beside him as he played. He was very generous, however ( or he simply got sick of my gawking ), and let me play games on it regularly. He'd always have to boot it up though, because I was only little and didn't have a clue how to input the DOS commands to get games to load...I still don't, actually. Ohhhhhh, and what games they were! The C64 had an absolute plethora of fun, deceptively simple games to play. Literally thousands of games. Sure, a lot of them were total shovelware, but there were so many diamonds amongst all the crap. Being the cool guy that my brother is, he and his friends would get all their games pirated and share them around amongst one another. You have to remember that this was in the mid 80s when pirating was running rampant like some sort of demented....pirate.

I have such clear, fond memories of playing games on the C64. Sure, by todays standards the games look like something a chimp programmed using a stick and a calculator, but it was the substance and fun of the games that counted. We also have to remember that this really was one of the most powerful machines of its time, and the games that came out on it were, for a brief period at least, at the cutting edge of game design. Most of these games were pure joy. I'll now do an overview of a few of my faves:

World Games



Probably my all time favourite game on the C64. Containing such fun events as bull riding, cliff diving, sumo wrestling and other strange things, this game was challenging and fun. Alot of the events involved insane button bashing and joy stick waggling, which i'm good at because I have a bizarre shaking ability that i've had since I was a baby. I've looked into it on the net, and I think it's called "Essential Tremors". As long as it never gets any worse, and allows me to kick ass on games such as this, then it's all good!

Gremlins



A straightforward text adventure at heart, this game also contained some very evocative and spooky graphics. Based upon the movie of the same name, of course, this game was very challenging. Whether it was challenging by purpose or design flaw, I can't actually remember. I'll always have a place in my heart for text adventures and this one ranks right up there. I remember there was one spot I could never get past. I can't remember exactly where I got stuck, but I think I eventually gave up on the game. Hmmm, strange that I remember it so fondly.

Monty On The Run



A colourful, and rather deviously hard platformer. Monty mole had a couple of games on the C64, this one being his second I think. Basically he was a mole who got in trouble alot, and thus had to run. So you get 'Monty On The Run'. The clearest memories I have of this game are the bright graphics and the catchy music.

Archon



Basically Chess, but with mythological characters and wizards and the like, this game was brilliant. Whenever you attempted to take a piece the screen would change to a one on one battle, an example of which you'll see in the picture above where a phoenix is battling a goblin. The phoenix was the best character, hands down. In fact, I was so attached to the phoenix that I distinctly remember one occasion where my sister made me cry when she defeated my phoenix. Screw Aerith dying, my mighty phoenix being taken down was by far the most traumatic experience I think I've had in gaming.

Eventually my brother got rid of his C64 and upgraded to an Amiga 500. While this was a very cool machine, it could never really replace the good ol' grey box C64. But all was not lost. A few years after this, my sister bought a C64 with some birthday money she had recieved. This was the best thing she'd ever decided to do, in my opinion. We still had the hundreds of games that my brother had for his C64, so we had a ready made back catalogue of favourites for us to play. Although something I didn't take into account was that, because it was my sister's computer, I might not be able to play it as much as I'd like to. Sadly, this turned out to be the case. She kept it in her room, and understandably enough she didn't want her whiny little brother in there all the time playing games. But she was magnanimous enough to let me play it occasionally, and this gave me my C64 fix. But was this enough? The answer: Yes. And by yes, I mean no.

A couple of years after this, I bought my first home games console in the form of the 8-Bit Nintendo Entertainment System. Sadly, this spelled the end of my love affair with the Commodore 64. I still find myself thinking about it fondly, however, and was very excited when I read that Commodore have resurrected themselves ( kind of like my beloved Phoenix...*sob* ) and are now making high-end enthusiast gaming computers.


It is now my sole purpose in life to own one of these machines...