My interest in gaming came early and I think it took off to a great extent with the many arcade games that used to be everywhere in the world, from airports to pizzerias. I certainly barely reached the top, but loved pushing all the buttons and jerking the yo-yo, kind of like it was me playing.
I never got any pennies to actually play for myself, and if I did manage to come across a penny for the purpose, I died quickly. Acquaintances we visited sometimes had video games at home, where in particular the Atari 2600 with its period wooden panel felt impressive, but I never got a device myself. The parents were convinced that gambling was corrupting, and it was probably just a fad.
I got my very first device when I was eight years old, when I was treated to a Game & Watch for my birthday. It was the orange and dual-screened Game & Watch game Donkey Kong. One day that led to many funny stories, like how the whole family raced like crazy and how the old man also got stuck and set incredible records while everything went faster and faster. But it’s only one game and I don’t think it really belongs here, and instead we have to jump ahead just under a year.
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By then we had started to get acquaintances who got a Commodore 64. The device had a staggering 64 kilobytes of RAM, which justified putting the number in the name. I was already familiar with the device when it launched after playing at friends and acquaintances’ places and was completely blown away by the stunning graphics and incredible possibilities (of which, unfortunately, piracy was a major part, which I didn’t even know where it was on the this time).
Courage and father had fallen short because they were convinced that the Commodore 64 would make me a computer guru and most likely they saw a system developer in front of them. The truth was, however, that it was exclusively the games that attracted, and games there would be. The single title that attracted me the most was Ghostbusters, which was based on the first film and was surprisingly advanced for its time. There were simpler strategic elements, an upgrade system, driving and a whole lot of ghost catching before Staypuft Marshmallow Man had to bite the extremely low resolution grass.
Although I bought some games for the Commodore 64, I copied all the more. It was not unusual for people to have regular cassettes with 30-40 games on them, which were however compressed and needed to be unpacked with a so-called Turbo program. Super Tape Turbo and Turbo 250 (which I remember was Swedish) were the ones I used most often, and made sure it was possible to start the games. Often they loaded incorrectly and you had to adjust the tone head of the accompanying cassette player (which looked like an oversized Barnängen block of soap) and repeat the procedure until you could start playing.
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It could thus take a good five to ten minutes to start a game, which was something everyone kindly accepted, but perhaps also explains why the NES was so easily able to take over a few years later. The purchase games cost maybe a tenth of what the games for the NES would later cost, but even then it didn’t feel particularly luxurious or high-tech with a new game, for example California games, on cassette.
Joysticks were the totally dominant way of playing games and what we associate today with a controller was not yet invented to any real extent. It made platforming and the like a total nightmare as the precision is so much less finesse when you’re expected to grip a stick that often has one of two buttons on top of the stick. Tac-2 was called a wildly popular compromise that became my and my brothers’ main option. A smaller joystick without a button on top, which you could play with without having to grip it. Thus, the control over what happened on the screen became completely different, and the Tac-2 was also semi-indestructible, despite stressful titles such as Summer Games where it was necessary to quickly wiggle the control back and forth to run fast.
Although there were several highlights for the Commodore 64 where I particularly remember things like Arkanoid, Giana Sisters, Outrun, Snoopy, Blood ‘n Guts, Bubble Bobble, The Last Ninja and the aforementioned Ghostbusters and California Games – an incredible amount of crap was played . Everything from the likes of Samantha Fox’s Strip Poker (with a resolution of 320×200 pixels, which required an enormous amount of imagination to see it as something sexy) to various lousy clones were consumed.
Today, there are very, very few games for the format that I think stand up. The games are simply so primitive that I can’t honestly say they’re entertaining anymore, even for me who was in, this unlike formats that came only a few years later such as the NES and Mega Drive where I find a lot of it just as fun now as then. The last game I bought for the Commodore 64 was Batman the Movie, which was based on the movie starring Michael Keaton. This was a very worthy swan song and just like the Ghostbusters one multifaceted and entertaining adventure I absolutely believe inspired Rocksteady Studios’ now famous Batman titles.
Shortly after my brothers and I finished Batman, in 1989, it was time to sell our Commodore 64. We bought an NES instead with Castlevania as our first game (besides the ones that came with it) and since then I’ve been primarily a console gamer and have remained so. My parents’ dream and using the computer for programming never got further than me drawing simple pictures by changing the color of the marker and programming the sounds for gun shots and doll screams – both of which were written down in the manual.
But I still think that in the end the Commodore 64 still gave me computer skills and a certain interest, something that served me well, and I’ve basically had to act as computer support for family, friends and neighbors all my adult life. And that’s something I have that old gaming computer to thank for, at least to a certain extent, in addition to all the sweet memories that led me to where I am today with, among other things, a career as an editor for Sweden’s largest gaming site. Not so badly pinked!
