Mar
28
Commodore 64
Filed Under Commodore 64 Games, commodore 64 | Leave a Comment
At the risk of horribly dating myself, I must to confess to owning one of the original Commodore 64 computers. Actually I should clarify that a little bit. My family owned a Commodore 64, as I was a little to young at the time to command the financial resources necessary to buy a computer. But, none the less I did manage to log plenty of time behind the keyboard of the “family” Commodore.
It was there, that I was to make my first painfully primitive attempt at writing a computer game. Actually calling that bit of code a game would be somewhat of a strange. There wasn’t a lot of user interaction with the “game”, as it was mainly a fancy animation of a sprite falling through a screen full of obstacles. But it was better than typing in the code from the latest issues of Commodore 64 fan magazines with program code filling many pages. That was my first intro to Peeks and Pokes and the idea of what a sprite was.
I did spend a fair amount of time with commercially available games on the Commodore. The series of Zork adventure games was some of the first I played. Lode Runner was also a popular family favourite, with my brother and I in a long heated battle for high scores that would often run till way to late many nights.
The Commodore 64 was produced for over ten years, from 1982 till 1993. Considering the rapid pace of computing and gaming consoles today, 10 years would equate to several life times. Even to this day, the 64 is still popular, if only from a historical, and nostalgic perspective. A query on Google for the term “Commodore 64” reveals over 8 million web pages of information. For a machine that has been out of production for over 15 years, and sold slightly more than 30 million units, that’s a pretty solid legacy.