How a home computer, the Commodore 64, became one of the best-selling gaming machines of all time.
  • jordanlund@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    5 months ago

    I’ve said this for years… There was no “gaming crash”, people just started playing games on the C-64.

          • Random_Character_A@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            5 months ago

            Here there was no sensible way to buy C64 games till the early 90’s. Late 80’s you could find few games “under the counter” in shops specialised in electronics, if you asked. They were usually expensive garbage and picked by someone, because of the cover art. There was always the one obscure flight sim for adults that was also shit.

            So 100% illegal copies.

            If somebody found a good game it was quickly bartered and copied to everyone else.

      • DrunkenPirate@feddit.orgEnglish
        5·
        5 months ago

        That’s were I started to get a big friends base in my neighborhood. Visit friends, play some games together, and copy floppy disks.

        I loved those starter pics and animations of the hacker groups.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      7·
      5 months ago

      The 64GS was one of Commodore’s last gasps at trying to make some money using the 8-bit parts they still had left in stock. The whole thing was a disaster.

      It wasn’t based on the C64. It was a C64. Without a keyboard and some of the other ports missing. A fact that came to bite anyone who tried a C64 cartridge game that needed keyboard input.

      And IIRC one of the games that came bundled with it was a game like that.

      They were at least smart enough to have the BASIC startup pointer (the one that otherwise caused READY. to appear) in the ROM patched to go to a neat little graphic telling people to turn it off, plug in a game and turn it back on again.

      What Commodore saved by releasing the GS, the customer ultimately paid by needing to buy games in a format more expensive than disk or tape that would run on a regular C64.

      … and given the time period, lots of people were buying PCs and offloading their regular C64 hardware and a ton of games for the price of the GS and its handful of games. And that C64 would run any GS game that was likely to come out.