Wednesday, March 7th, 2007...2:24 am
Can you remember the Commodore 64?
My first experience with computers was when my parents bought me a Commodore 64. I loved the thing. Looking back I’m not sure why.
When I got mine disk drives weren’t available yet, so programs had to be loaded from cassette tapes, which often took hours.
- Games were simplistic.
- The pinnacle of its graphics were stick figures and monotone blobs that vaguely resembled worldly objects.
- Its biggest competitor was the abacus.
Kids these days throw a fit if their XBox 360 doesn’t load a level in 5 seconds flat. Boohoo for you and your ritalin popping friends. Try waiting an hour for a game to load only to find out it won’t actually run and you have to start over.
If you want to reach enlightenment you don’t need to meditate, just find a Commodore 64 and try to load Frogger. There’s some Zen shit going on there.
What got me thinking about all this was the news that Commodore wants to release their own line of branded gaming PCs.
I wish them the best of luck. It’ll be nice seeing the Commodore brand in the wild again. Let’s just hope they have more success than AmigaOS.
Update:
I just remembered that a bunch of guys over at 1UP who do a podcast called Retronauts, recorded an episode on the Commodore 64 a few weeks ago. Look for Episode 12.
9 Comments
March 7th, 2007 at 2:38 am
I still remember there was a football game I used to play on the commodore 64 I got. It was the good ol’ days!
March 7th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
I remember playing a game with an ant. I can’t remember the name or what you had to do, just that it had an ant and that I enjoyed it.
It was a much simpler time.
March 7th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
OMG that was so the same C64 I had! It was my families first computer and at the age of 6 I learnt Basic and was programming my own little games.
Some of my favorites (and still to this day) are:
Jumpman
Pharaoh’s Curse
BaggitMan
Raid Over Moscow
Choplifter
Xaxon
Q-Burt
And many others.
After our disk drive died and there was no one to fix it here in Vancouver, I used the monitor as a TV for a really long time. It lasted forever!
March 8th, 2007 at 12:48 am
They don’t make hardware like they used to. My C64 got dropped all the time and it kept working.
March 8th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Oh my gosh, we totally had a commedore 64. I loved playing games on that thing. But you’re right, some of them took hours to load. I can’t believe I used to be that patient haha. The worse was when I would try a new game that I never played before and it ended up being crappy and boring. You take all the time to let it load and then it’s not even fun to play! I wonder what happened to that thing. I think it’s in the basement. I should go play it! My fav games were paperboy, murder on the mississippi, and wild wild west (or something like that).
March 8th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Paperboy was an awesome game but it was so damn hard. That’s another thing I remember from back then. Games used to be so much harder. I don’t remember ever finishing a game before I got a SNES.
March 10th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
[…] I wrote about the Commodore 64 the other day Coach Coco mentioned a piece of trivia I’d never heard. Apparently William […]
March 11th, 2007 at 1:45 am
Game play nowadays is definitely not what it used to be.
I would still play my C64 games if I had it. In fact I did have a C64 emulator a couple years ago, that was fun!
March 11th, 2007 at 3:09 am
True Tyler. I’ve got two old Amigas in the garage which I’m pretty sure still work. If I had joysticks for them it’d be worth digging them out.
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