Were they pretty mainstream? Were they pirated, maybe they were cracked and trainer versions with hella cool scene intros with badass SID music?
Do you remember the names of them? Do you just have vague memories?
At some point I was trying to compile a list of all the games I grew up with, which I guess were mostly pirated. I didn’t really necessarily realize the concept at the time but they all had really cool intros and scene stuff. And the trainers for my 7-year-old ass were pretty helpful for some of these games cuz some of them were brutal as fuck.
Anybody have any favorites?
Maybe also any favorite soundtracks? The commodore 64 was known for having some pretty fucking wicked tunes. Some of them still haunt me to this day. Shit like forbidden Forest or maybe like Aztec challenge for example I think had dope as fuck soundtracks. I can’t quite remember the soundtrack for the The quest for fire but for some reason the game keeps coming up in my mind. And I always think of, I think it was just labeled stealth on the disc, I don’t remember the soundtrack for it either, but I remember the gameplay. You were just flying towards a tower and shooting stuff. The tower got closer and closer. I never got there. Another one I guess I think of with the soundtrack would be spies demise and it involved elevators and some classical music I think. I think a lot of games did classical music back in the day, but you wouldn’t know it from the wicked ass way they did it. A weird one from memory would be like also baggit man, I can almost hear a soundtrack but the concept was just so crazy. You were like a criminal running from cops and putting bags of money and minecarts. And then there’s stuff like pitfall 2, that had that damn red dog you could see from the very beginning that you were trying to get to. I think I remember my older sister having an actual photograph of her next to the dog on the other side of the start screen and I was like so impressed by that. Skate or die had some pretty rad music. I always fucking sucked at it but thank God there was a trainer for that. Don’t remember music for BC’s quest for tires, but I do remember that fucking turtle I had to try to figure out how to jump over. It was in a pond or some shit. And you had to like duck trees and shit too. I don’t even know. I think it had a sequel. Anyway, I’m just rambling now on a tangent incoherently, but I’d love to hear everyone else’s experiences with gaming on the commodore 64
Probably G.U.T.Z. because it had both the Fairlight and I.N.C. intro. plus at the time I was about 13 and it had just gotten released. it was really cool. Still don’t know which hit harder the Fairlight or the I.N.C. intro, to me both are legendary.
Sword of Fargoal
Pool of Radiance
Wizard’s Crown
I mostly collected them and made menus on backup-disks and didn’t play them a lot, but Mail Order Monsters was cool, made by the people who made Archon and had some of the gameplay. Raid on Bungling Bay had it’s engine reused for the first Sim City. The Infocom adventures like Hitchhikers guide and Suspended, the Zorks, The Bards Tales, Ultima 4, Maniac mansion, Paradroid, Racing Destruction Set, Adventure Construction Set, montezuma’s revenge, guess I could go on all day the longer I think about it the more there were
They were all pirated. It’s amazing how well these games got distributed in schools via friends before the internet. Had the c64 from the day it was released until the Amiga came out, it was only 3 years, yet the amount of distribution and networking in those 3 years was substantial. Physical meet copy parties were a huge thing and morphed into other kinds of groups (like D&D) when people mostly outgrew casual childhood piracy.
Impossible mission from my childhood is a good one. Summer games also brings back memories.
Well, never had one myself, was one of the (un)lucky pc users, even then.
But of course I played some games at a friend. Spontaneously I remember:
- katakis
- krakout
I remember both as good games with nice presentation and good music, especially krakout.
LOAD "*" ,8,1Lode Runner. Very simple game, with a shitload of levels that ranged from easy to hell. Bonus: You had a level editor and create and play your own levels. My friend and I exchanged levels that were nuclear.
I fucking loved lode runner!
Was this the one?
Yep. That’s the one.
Fort apocalypse was pretty neat too. I can still hear the helicopter beating
Impossible Mission
Pirates!
Reader Rabbit
Archon
Super Huey
Those were the ones I played as a kid
Stay awhile. Stay… forever!
Sentinel was an interesting one. 999 levels, but not every level was possible to finish. But the game was designed that way, and depending on how many points you got, you advanced a different number of levels, so you could redo the level before and try to score differently.
And: there was no “Save” or “Load” feature. If you completed a level, you got a kind of code, and with entering the code, you could jump to that position.
“Chimera” was a cool angle-perspective game where you used a robot in a maze to solve puzzles.
“Bruce Lee” blew my mind. The graphics were well done and the gameplay was great.
There was also a game where you played a bird and popped bird droppings on people. 13 year old me found that a hoot.
I also thoroughly enjoyed many of the games I typed in manually from compute magazine and computes gazette. I distinctly remember a side-scrolling game where a man would run and jump hurdles.
Frogger
I remember typing in pages and pages of DATA lines for a cover-version of that game that got printed in a computer magazine.
Without question, Ultimate Wizard. The fact that you could custom make levels had me drawing plans on graph paper for hours!
It’s hard to choose one, or just a few, even. I’ve dumped unhealthy amount of hours into
- North & South
- Street Rod
- Defender of the Crown
- Newcomer
- Supremacy
- Wizard of Wor was the first C64 title (and first PvPvE game!!) I’ve played and I just got a custom hat with a reference to it.
- HeroQuest
There was this RPG I forgot the name of where you had maybe a warrior, a barbarian and a thief and you could check for traps, fight enemies (round based) and rest, and the levels were dungeons where you could see one isometric room at once, divided into maybe 8*8 squares… Ultima, maybe…? Pool of radiance? Something entirely different? I forgot the name, sadly.
About music: some titles are iconic, like Commando and Monty on the run (the latter made me feel anxious, for some reason), but to date I’m still doing exercise to the metal version of Last ninja 2 - Central Park and Golden Axe. About once a month I also listen to the masterpiece that is the C64 orchestra’s rendition of Supremacy. I find both the metal and original versions of Myth a banger, too.
Jeroen Tel is a genius.
Mousetrap, that one was wicked. I think I had a trainer for that too cuz it was hard as fuck but there was like little peanut looking platforms you could jump on but they would disappear after a while. And there was like a fucking dragon involved or some shit but I don’t know what were you trying to do. Get to a piece of Cheese at the end of every level?
