I've always been a nerd

The Commodore 64 - A King Among Computers?

Ahhh, the Commodore 64. Anybody over the age of about 20 should remember that name with fondness and warm goodness in their stomachs. 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 was the person in our family who originally had a C64. I was incredibly envious, but he was very generous and let me play games on it regularly. He'd always have to boot it up though, cause I was only little and didn't have a clue how to input the DOS commands to get games to load. Ohhhhhh, and what games they were!! The C64 had an absolute plethora of fun, simple, and fun games to play. Literally thousands of fun fun games. 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. And most of these games were pure joy. I'll now do an overview of a few of my faves.

World Games:

Gremlins:

Monty On The Run:

I also distinctly remember one time when I cried when my phoenix died in a particular game, the name of which escapes me. Also chopping off peoples heads in "Barbarian" was very cool. Lots o' goodness to be had from the old time games.

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'd 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. Brilliant! 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. But sadly, this was the case. She kept it in her room, and understandably enough she didn't want her whiny little brother in their 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 though, and unless i'm very much mistaken we still have my sister's C64 in a cupboard somewhere. I've toyed with the idea of hunting it out and setting it up again, but i'm really a very lazy person so it's probably not gonna happen. What I think i'll end up doing is downloading a C64 emulator and playing all the old games on my PC. Yeah, that's a good idea. Excuse me while I go and relive my glory days....

- Pete