Commodore 64 – Launch titles & Must-plays: Part II

13. Kickman

Commodore

Swiftly and briefly moving over to the slightly darker side of Coin-Op conversions…

About those earliest Commodore 64 Coin-Op-ports that were better than the originals… Okay, so there was probably only one “so far” – Clowns. And somewhere on the very vague good-to-bad scale is this game called Kickman. A quick look at any screenshot immediately reveals that it might actually be a conversion of Midway’s Kick from 1981. Because which else game has a clown riding on a unicycle while either popping or catching balloons with his pointy hat? With the balloons initially and nicely in rows and columns – Space Invaders-style? Plus a couple of Pac-Men among the balloons for good measure…?! (They sure had some wild and crazy ideas when they designed the Old School Coin-Ops.)

The arcade original is a colorful experience that showed where arcade games were heading audiovisually speaking. And Commodore figured that there had to be a home version of such a classic. But they didn’t settle for one variant, but two…! One version plays and looks better than the other one. And the other one that is called “Version 02” could have used some serious polish. But whichever version you play, you might pretty soon put a curse on the people who invented the concept of “sound” in computers… Because holy shit what horrendous “music” someone managed to torture out of the SID-chip. (You’ll be able to concentrate on the game properly if you turn off the sound completely… And you’ll be happier and slightly more sane too…)

So as “Kick Man”, you ride left and right between two buildings on the screen. Above you are levitating balloons that one by one drop down once every few seconds. You can either pop them with your hat, or kick them back into the air. Miss a balloon, and you fall off your unicycle and lose a… Unicycle… Bouncing the balloons like the ball in Breakout earns a higher score – Especially if you can keep them in the air… Yeah… Good luck with that… The next stage has Kick Man catching balloons and stacking them on his head. A maximum of five balloons can be stacked. (The sixth and subsequent ones pop like on the first stage.) And when a Pac-Man comes sailing towards you, you have to catch it as well since it eats all the balloons and gives you even more Bonus-points.

The “other” version of Kickman with better graphics also controls slightly better. And the programming is fairly good with no apparent bugs. The “Version 02” has lazier graphics / layout and occasional slowdowns. (Although those don’t affect the game. You can just tell by how the balloons move.) So was it all a rush job to keep some deadline? Who knows? — 1 Player · Joystick / Keyboard · Cassette (Physical + Download)

14. Le Mans

Commodore / HAL Laboratory

Commodore were kings on their own platform for a brief period in time. (And 1982 was that time.) And they tried to publish at least one game in each major video game category.

Racing is on the menu next, so prepare yourself for a real endurance test in a.k.a. “Le Mans 24 Hour Road Race”…! Okay, so you probably won’t be sitting in front of the screen for a full day and night, but don’t be surprised if that “Just once more”-factor kicks in when you least expect it…! A non-stop vertically scrolling top-down road lies ahead of you in your nitroglycerine-loaded racing car. Along highways, through dark tunnels, on icy roads and narrow passages, you have to pass a number of drivers in indestructible cars in order to gain those precious points. Each part of the race is one (actual) minute long, and within that time, you have to earn 20.000 points to stay in the race. Brakes are for the weak and the losers, so those were removed from your car before the race. This means that you can step on the gas and accelerate up to 300 kph, but to slow down, you simply release the Fire-button and “brake” with the engine. Some of the drivers speed along in a safe(r) and traditional fashion, i.e., going straight on a straight road. But the rest must have grown bored out of their skulls during the 24 hour race. Because they are obviously drinking and driving. (The road is never too wide for those irritating, hammered bastards.)

The deal with the race is that you get 1.000 points for every ten cars that you overtake. (But the score-counter increases constantly.) The number of cars you have passed are displayed in the lower right corner. If you crash, the number resets and you end up in the disgraceful “Pit” (Always on the left side of the road.) and lose some time. Once you have got 20.000 points more, the clock resets back to 60 seconds. (You might as well restart the game if you are like 10.000 points from the target score and there are merely seconds left.)

Racing around Le Mans would be easy had it not been for the other boozers behind the wheel. The screen scrolls pretty fast and the car is quick to respond. It’s all about skill and lightning fast reactions. The variation in the surroundings is a nice feature too. When you drive through a tunnel (Or is it supposed to be night driving?), you only see the silhouettes of the other cars in your headlights… The original version of Le Mans was released on cartridge and utilized Paddle controls only. — 1 Player · Joystick / Paddle · Cassette / Cartridge (Physical + Download)

15. Night Driver

Commodore / HAL Laboratory

And what about a Light version of Atari Inc.’s groundbreaking Coin-Op?

Atari’s Night Driver is known as one of the first games that showed graphics in first person perspective. (Not bad for a Coin-Op from 1976…!) But the game benefited from not having much in the shape of CPU-demanding visuals. Like, at all. You don’t actually see shit apart from the white verge posts on both sides of the winding and narrow road. The lack of graphics also gave the game a solid and good frame-rate including a fluid sense of velocity. The game puts you in a car on this very dark road. Your only goal is to drive and try to avoid collisions while going as fast as possible. And all this on a time limit. (So this race is obviously for people who just can’t find enough excitement in daytime racing.) The Atari 2600-port was released in 1980 and included other vehicles as well as some scenery. (Houses and trees – If you had pretty vivid imagination.) It could have even been called Night Driver II, because of the many differences but mainly because it doesn’t really look like the original Night Driver.

And about two years later, we got the C64 conversion which removes not only the difficulty setting and randomized expert level, but also the manual gear shifting and the option to be able to set the time limit. You get 99 seconds and that’s it. You only get “Extended Play” if you manage to travel 6 km. before time runs out. Plus you drive an automatic. The gears (N, D, 2, 1) are displayed at the bottom of the screen, including speed, distance driven (in kilometers), time, and the Hi-score. (Which is also is in kilometers.) On the static title screen, you get the option to play with either a Joystick, Paddle, or the keyboard. Only three keys are used. There are no brakes on this car either – Just the gas pedal. (Who the hell needs anything else than speed, right?) The verge posts may not move or render as smoothly as they do in the Coin-Op, but they scale more evenly than in the 2600-version. The only other graphics in the game is the front of your red sports car fixed in the middle of the screen and the animated windshield cracking when you slam into a post.

The arcade version had really good sound for the time, and the C64 isn’t far behind. The SID-chip does its multi-channel imitation of a powerful engine, and it ain’t bad at all considering that many future racing games sounded like you were playing around with a dental air turbine unit. — 1 Player · Joystick / Keyboard / Paddle · Cassette / Cartridge (Physical + Download)

Night Driver was also released in Japan as Road Race for the Commodore MAX.

16. Omega Race

Commodore

“Just like the real arcade game”, says the box cover for the ColeoVision version of Omega Race. The C64 one calls it: “A special home version of the Bally Midway Arcade Game”…

Special, indeed. Omega Race was Midway’s only attempt at creating their own vector-graphics based game that attempted to one-up Asteroids. It graced the arcades in 1981, and it was co-developed with Commodore and CBS Electronics with the plans to hit the home market the year later. Apart from the C64, it was also released for the Atari 2600, VIC-20, and ColecoVision. Omega Race is a Shoot ‘Em-Up set in the 80s future, in the year 2003, where the player has ended up in a confined rectangular space surrounded by impenetrable force-fields. This space has another rectangular block in the middle that conveniently displays the score, Hi-score, and number of lives left. (So you and your sworn enemies are actually flying around the stats-table.) On the title screen, you get to select controls. If you choose the Paddle, the controls mimic the Coin-Op ones with a spinner for ship rotation plus two buttons – Fire and thrust. The keyboard controls logically use four keys. With the Joystick, you simply thrust by pushing the stick upwards. You can also change “ship color” with the F7-key, but essentially you select the color of all the graphics except for the cold, black space that is the backdrop.

The idea is to destroy everything that moves (Save for yourself.) and doesn’t move. The game sure reminds of Asteroids as far as the triangular ship, 360 degree shooting, vector graphics, and single-screen level is concerned. (Except there are no warp-zones at the edges of the screen. The section of the force-fields that is hit by either a ship or a laser-bullet flashes for a fragment of a second to illustrate this fact.) But instead of huge rocks, you shoot at mines and other space-ships. A collision with any of these equals doom, but that isn’t the case when you bounce against the walls or the force-fields. Manage to clear a couple of screens and blast enough ships that amount to 40.000 points, and you get an extra life. Omega Race is by definition an archetype for classic arcade games. The C64-port delivers what’s promised in the ads very well and it certainly is a faster and better game that the 2600-version. Simple fun and pretty addictive blasting that for some reason wasn’t a part of the “same” conversation as the other classics. — 1 Player · Joystick / Paddle / Keyboard · Cassette / Cartridge (Physical + Download)

Omega Race was also released as Omega Battle with slight differences to the graphics. (The default C64-font is a giveaway.) There is also a “Version 2” where you can change both the ship- and the screen colors.

17. Radar Rat Race

Commodore / HAL Laboratory

In the zany world of HAL Laboratory, racing cars turn into rats when Rally-X becomes Radar Rat Race.

Rally-X is a 1980 Coin-Op in which Namco thought that racing in a maze would be a great idea. (And it is, if you have cars that can turn in 90 degree angles.) HAL Laboratory had other ideas and replaced the cars with rats. Rats in a maze is a concept that makes more sense either way. In this four-way scrolling top-down view maze, you race for some sweet cheese. You control the blue rat while three (initially) red rats chase you around. Colliding with other rats or cats is of course deadly, with the only advantage being that the cats don’t move. For your protection, you have “star screen”, which is released with the Fire-button. I can’t believe that the “star screen” is anything else than some foul bodily fluid that puts the opponents out of commission for a couple of seconds. Releasing the stuff costs time, though. Time is displayed as a shrinking gauge above the playing area. And to complete a level, you have to collect all the cheese before the timer is depleted. But how do you locate the cheese in a maze that’s at least a couple of dozen screens large? Easy. Use the on screen radar. The radar shows your and the other rats’ positions as well as the delicious dairy products.

The maze doesn’t luckily have any cul-de-sacs, but those bloody cats don’t make things easier. Or the trio of rodent red bastards that more or less hunt you in a pack. The next cheese always increases the score-count, and when you get 20.000, you have earned an extra rat. And as expected, every Round gets harder and harder with faster rat enemies and such. You can kind of tell that the game wasn’t exactly programmed in lightning-fast machine code – The maze doesn’t scroll as much as jump eight pixels at a time, and the graphics flicker slightly when more than one object move about. But that doesn’t lessen the tension and the challenge. You might just swear occasionally when you can’t outrun a rat that’s basically glued to your ass. And the graphical limitations of the character blocks (There are no Sprites in this game.) mean that a rat that’s too close can’t be sprayed with the “star screen” either… Oh… And turn off that bloody horrible “music”…! — 1 Player · Joystick / Keyboard · Cassette / Cartridge (Physical + Download)

Radar Rat Race is another title that was released on cartridge in Japan on the Commodore MAX Machine. (It was also made for the VIC-20.) The only differences between the two versions are the green background (Which makes the yellow cheese slightly more visible when it’s placed to a white background.) and that you release the “star screen” with the A-key instead of the S-key.

18. Seafox

Brøderbund

A slightly surreal military operation – In tight spots, underwater, aboard a submarine.

Some heartless bastard of a commander has sent you and your blue submarine towards waters that you can’t escape from and where you constantly are under attack from multiple directions. The attackers are all part of an enemy convoy that you have no other option but to try to wipe out before your fuel runs out. Mines, depth charges, and torpedoes form your biggest collective issue from the first moment. (It says “Mission One” at the top of the screen, but they forgot the prefix “Suicide”.) But you are at least armed with a couple of torpedoes (30) that you can fire in two directions. The Fire-button fires a torpedo vertically on screen towards the horizon, at the ships and the destroyers. Pushing the Joystick right while pressing Fire shoots a horizontal torpedo. Subs appear from both the left and the right sides of the screen, but you can only shoot right. This means that subs approaching from behind have to be dodged. Every now and then, a green submarine comes sliding across the ocean floor. It releases a dolphin that attempts to brings fuel and more torpedoes to you. Fail to catch them in time, and… A clam darts after them and… Eats them… Yeah. Why not…? Sinking enough ships and turning enough subs to atoms means a successful mission. (Although you never know how many you need to destroy, or how many you have destroyed.)

Seafox has five levels, and sure – Controlling a submarine shouldn’t be a smooth deal, but the bad news creep in like water through a leaking hull on Mission Two. That’s when the game starts to suffer from severe slowdowns. When the destroyers start bombarding you with charges and multiple subs move in at the same time, the game almost grinds to a fourth of its initial frame-rate. Most of the Sprites may be small, but the software clearly wasn’t optimized for a Sprite-count that reaches a dozen. It’s still playable, but the built-in unintentional “Slow Motion”-mode might become gradually more and more annoying. No matter what, there are some tactics involved as you need to be able to predict the next moments.

The graphics are quite charming in their most simple appearance. There was this early “Brøderbund”-aesthetic that kind of never was meant to survive beyond 1984. The sound effects aren’t particularly eargasm-triggering either. The only musical cues are simple jingles of “Sailor’s Hornpipe” before and after a mission. Despite the similarity in gameplay, Seafox is not to be confused with Sea Wolf. (Seafox isn’t a Coin-Op port to begin with.) — 1 Player · Joystick / Keyboard · Cassette / Cartridge (Physical + Download)

Trivia: Developer Ed Hobbs also created The Castles Of Dr. Creep in 1984. The C64-version was programmed by Mike Wise.

19. Sea Wolf

Commodore

Flashing Lights. Realistic Sounds. Adjustable Extended Play. Ball Bearing Periscope Sighting Device. Revolutionary Micro-Processor Controls. 23″ Solid State T.V. Monitor…

… Now of course, none of the above is understandably in the home conversion of this particular game… Dave Nutting Associates (One of the victims of the 1983 video game crash.) were behind a whole bunch of groundbreaking Pinball- and arcade games from the mid-to-late 70s and early 80s. Among some in the latter category were Gun Fight, Wizard Of Wor, and this 1976 Midway Games-published Shoot ‘Em-Up called Sea Wolf. (A spiritual successor to Namco’s / SEGA’s 1966 game Periscope.)

In the original game, you aim and shoot at various vessels at sea using a physical, moving periscope. And when such an iconic experience goes through the transformation to a T.V. screen and a hand controller, certain things get lost. The immersion, in this case. Commodore’s port (Made for the VIC-20 and the C64.) is a very basic Shooter for two players only. Each player controls an equally basic-looking submarine (Yellow and orange.) that moves horizontally across the bottom of the screen. And you fire torpedoes at the freighters, cruisers, and P.T. boats above you. For every fourth fired torpedo, you have to reload for three seconds. Between you and the ships at the horizon, mines pop up at random intervals. Shooting them don’t do any harm except it’s another torpedo down the drain.

The goal is to try to make as many ships and boats to explode as possible in the set time limit. The time limit can be set between one to nine minutes. (Optimistic.) Freighters give you 200 points, cruisers are 500 points, and the trickiest ones to hit (Due to their speed.) are the 1000 points worth P.T. boats. Game Over, and the highest score between the two of you… Gets the Hi-score… (Which is displayed at the top of the screen.) There really isn’t that much else to Sea Wolf, except you get a chance to practice your aim and blast stuff for a couple of minutes. So that you can get good at Sea Wolf and get that Hi-score. The graphics include a couple of single-colored Sprites, and the soundscape is made up of basic shooting- and explosion noises. The whole novelty of the game was probably the Paddle controls as Sea-Wolf on the C64 must be one of the earliest commercial games with the shortest lastability.

The possible reason why the single-player mode is missing, is because there would be no sense of competition or progress otherwise. (There is no Hi-score table either. You have to “Save State” the whole thing if it ever comes to proving your excellence.) But the game runs smoothly, and it certainly looks particularly “next gen” after Shooters on machines like, e.g., the IntelliVision. — 2 Players (Simultaneous) · Paddle · Cassette / Cartridge (Physical + Download)

Additional note: There are Joystick-operated versions of Sea Wolf if you don’t own a Paddle. And if you don’t have a Joystick, there are always other controllers. And mice. In an emulator like VICE, you can switch to Paddles under Machine Settings > Joyport Settings and activate “Grab mouse events” under Mouse Emulation. That way, you can play the game at least.

20. Serpentine

Brøderbund

How well does Pac-Man and Snake mix…?

It’s a rhetorical question, but was there ever a point in time where there was one Worm / Snake clone, and one Pac-Man variant? Still, one game had to be first in fusing the two together – At least on this platform. (In the arcades, Konami did it slightly earlier with Jungler.) Well, it was bound to happen. Two very popular games set in mazes that both deal with eating stuff for survival… Why couldn’t they blend together in a successful way…? And that’s how you get a game like Serpentine. Finding the balance was probably the difficult part.

David Snider created the game for Apple II, and the C64-port was done by Mac Senour. (His only official game developing credit.) Serpentine is controlled with either the Joystick or four keys on the keyboard. As a blue snake, you crawl around a maze together with red snakes. Each snake consists of round segments, and the goal is simply to eliminate the other snakes. A head-on collision with a snake that’s longer than two segments results in the loss of one life. (The first segment is unsurprisingly the head.) But you can eat the segments from the other snakes if you attack their “tails”. A snake that shrinks to two segments turns green and can be swallowed whole from both directions. Eating one segment makes you grow one segment. And, of course, your segments can be eaten by the other snakes. You also grow one segment if you manage to devour the frogs that randomly and frequently appear in the maze. Every now and then, the snakes lay eggs in the maze.

Your eggs grant extra lives (You begin the game with three.) when they hatch, and CPU-controlled snakes’ eggs hatch more red snakes. (The frogs also eat the eggs.) When you have killed the other snakes, you are transported to the next level. Each level has a different maze with both advantages and disadvantages. Luckily, there are no dead ends, but it’s not uncommon that two snakes crawl towards you from two directions in the same part of the corridor, making escape impossible. Eating also awards different points, and once you get 20.000, you get another life. (Then another one at 50.000 and 100.000.)

Serpentine works well and there are no game-breaking bugs as such. It may not look that polished with the most basic Hi-score-list possible and an equally basic Hi-score-entry sequence, but the game is enjoyable and it’s easy to go a couple of rounds and try to get through “just one more level”. There are no difficulty modes or settings, so what you play is what you get. (And not that much blood, sweat, and tears.) — 1 Player · Joystick / Keyboard · Cassette (Physical + Download)

Trivia: David Snider also created the Pinball-game David’s Midnight Magic. After Serpentine, Snider withdrew completely from the video game business, i.e., there are no other published games credited to him.

21. Super Alien

Commodore

Pac-Man – If you replace Pac-Man with a dude digging and filling up holes, remove all the pills, and exchange the ghosts with aliens…

Okay, so it doesn’t sound like Pac-Man at all at this point, does it? It’s just that every single-screen maze game in the very early 80s was automatically associated with said game. And Super Alien was basically therefore doomed to become “just another game among the rest” from the outset. I don’t know if it’s the name with two very commonly used words that made it “faceless”, or the gameplay itself. You rarely hear anyone reference it in any way when talking about classic C64 games, and searching for a review of it, written or “YouTubed”, barely gives any hits. (At least in mid 2020.)

Anyway, the conclusion is that it’s one of Commodore’s more “obscure” games from their library. In Super Alien, you run around a maze and try not to get devoured by aliens. The only thing that you can do to avoid your demise is to dig holes in the floors. By holding down the Fire-button and pushing the Joystick left or right, you either dig a hole or fill up a hole with soil. You can’t pass your own holes, so even in these mazes without dead ends, you can create some yourself. The idea is to make the aliens fall into a hole that’s big enough and then quickly fill it up before the alien crawls out of the hole. When all the aliens are buried, you move to the next screen. Which of course is slightly harder as the number of aliens increase on the subsequent levels along with the speed of their movement. The game doesn’t exactly start in a relaxed or casual mode, and it just keeps getting “worse”. That aurally hypnotizing soundscape doesn’t relax anyone in the entire universe either.

The monochromatic (green and black) graphics look beautifully Old School, and the small aliens are cute. The right side of the screen displays the Hi-score, your score, level (“Screen”), the number of lives, and the keyboard controls. (It’s slightly easier to dig and fill with the A- and D-keys respectively than having to use the Fire-button if you quickly need to fill up a hole and leg it.) — 1 Player · Joystick / Keyboard · Cartridge (Download)

Super Alien was originally released for the VIC-20 and Commodore MAX Machine before it found its way to the C64… But here is thing: I haven’t been able to Google up a single picture of anything C64-related as far as a physical release is concerned. No cassettes. No Western box art. (That isn’t for the VIC-20 cartridge.) So it just probably was transfered to tapes / tape images and spread around the world.

22. Tooth Invaders

Commodore

“You only need to brush and floss the teeth that you want to keep.”

That’s an actual quote from the lady who visited the primary schools once a week (At least here in Sweden in the 80s.) and gave the kids a small cup of fluoride mouthwash. And those were attention-grabbing words for sure. Just like Tooth Invaders clearly is one attention-grabbing concept game – With visual warnings to us all…!

When the teeth turn gray and fall out, and the usual way of brushing teeth just doesn’t work, you send in the Plaqueman. Plaqueman’s mission is to floss the teeth, brush them properly, and put the tooth invader / destroyer D.K. Germ out of commission. Stronger toothpaste would probably melt the teeth as well, so this has to be done manually. On display are eight teeth, and on the right side of the screen, you have a toothbrush, toothpaste, and floss. (Plaqueman and D.K. Germ moves freely around the mouth.) First, you have to grab the floss. When you press the Fire-button, the mouth zooms in (And the playing area turns multi-directional scrolling.) and you can see the plaque on the teeth. Walk over each bit of plaque, and they disappear. However, in “zoomed in”-mode, D.K. Germ can kill you with a single touch. (If D.K. can make teeth rot in moments, then Plaqueman is no match for its corrosive presence.) Zoom out, and you can fetch the toothbrush while D.K. can do you no harm. Then, it’s time to put on some toothpaste. (By walking over it with the toothbrush in hand.) Zoom in again, and you can clean the teeth while you avoid D.K. (The bacteria is shown as black specks on each tooth.) A clean tooth starts flashing in different colors and D.K. can’t damage it anymore.

When all teeth are shining clean, they get rinsed, and you get to the next level. (There are nine. “Level 1” is as easy as brushing your teeth for real (Eh?), and “Level 9” is a dentist’s nightmare as the mouth soon looks like the one of a long-time junkie who doesn’t know what a toothbrush is.)

23. Wizard Of Wor

Commodore

There’s always room for one more Dave Nutting Associates, Inc. classic… In a slightly different version in this case…

The Midway published 1980 Coin-Op from the mind of Dave Nutting was a thankful game to port to home systems – There are no intricate multi-directional screen-scrolling routines, the sprites are “barely” dual-colored, the sound is something that, e.g., the SID-chip easily can handle, and there are almost no background graphics save for mono-chromatic lines and flashing pixels for the star field.

Just like Kickman and Avenger, Wizard Of Wor was released in two different version. The 1982 original is the Commodore MAX Machine one. Jeff Bruette created the second, more well known version (Also known as Wizard.) in 1983. It’s objectively way more closer to the Coin-Op than this port. The differences are many and obvious. (And not in a good way.) The game is a single-screen maze-level based Shooter where you, the Worrior, walk around with a laser-rifle and blast monsters. The more you manage to kill, the more manic and harder to kill the remaining ones become. Eventually, the Wizard appears. Clear the maze, get the Bonus-points and teleport to the next stage. (The four monsters give 100-400 points each, and for the Wizard, you get “Mystery Points”.)

The gameplay is frantic and the Worrior’s weapon does have Auto-Fire, but there are also some pretty strange slowdowns, and the fire-rate depends on how far the bullets have to travel. (Since you can’t fire more than one bullet at a time.) The first obvious difference between this version and the Coin-Op is the lack of simultaneous two-player co-op mode. That’s basically a big chunk of the concept instantly gone. Then, there are the visual differences. There is no on-screen radar, and the whole game has a very “rushed” feel. But the biggest issue would be the random movements of the enemies and the slightly weird collision detection. The monsters don’t act at all like in the original game. Don’t get me wrong – This Wizard Of Wor port is an addictive and enjoyable Shooter, but there’s just so much missing… So much that doesn’t look and play right…

Commodore probably saw all the problems with this version and decided to publish Bruette’s version for that very reason. Bruette’s conversion is basically arcade perfect (With slightly more color! The only thing missing is the attract mode that shows how the game works.) in proper tempo and without slowdowns. And controls that feel right. All the mechanics and features are included – The Dungeons, Arenas, and Pits. The monsters are correctly presented with the right score awards. The front end looks like it’s supposed to and the visual effects (Screen flashing and such.) further bring the game closer to its original look. (Only the stars in the background are absent.) And it has the Dragnet-jingle. — 1 Player · Joystick / Keyboard · Cartridge (Physical + Download)

Trivia: Baby Pac-Man (1982) is one of Dave Nutting Associates’ later Coin-Op games that wasn’t ported for the C64. (The game by the same name, from Uki Software, isn’t to be confused with the arcade version.) Gorf (1981) was however released, in two versions, in 1983.

24. Zork I – The Great Underground Empire

Commodore / Infocom

The undisputed Royalty in text adventures makes their debut on the C64…

Closer to twenty pieces of “interactive fiction” a.k.a. “text adventures” were published on the C64 during its first few months on the market. But three of these stuck out among the other more or less clever and no doubt mind-boggling adventures. (Like for example Bruce Robinson’s Jack & The Beanstalk and Sentient Software’s Cyborg.) The three were: Zork I – The Great Underground Empire, Deadline, and Starcross. Marc Blank and Dave Lebling wrote Zork (Which was developed as “Dungeon Of Zork” way back in 1979 for mainframe computers.) and due to its size, it could only be released in three parts on the home computers.

Blank and Lebling also wrote Deadline and Starcross respectively. That’s three I.P.s in three different genres. Zork is… Well, every adventurer knows what Zork is, right?! (It’s that game of adventure, danger, and low cunning…!) Deadline is an Expert-level murder mystery in semi-real-time (Every command forwards the in-game clock.), and Starcross is labeled as “Interlogic Science Fiction”. (Also for Expert-level players.) Another thing that these games have in common is their now legendary publisher – Infocom. Infocom would become and, unsurprisingly, remain the leading company behind numerous (Thirty or so in total.) fantastic and brain-tickling adventures during the following years. (The entire 80s, in fact.)

And this trio of games (Powered, like all Infocom’s adventures, by ZIL – Zork Implementation Language.) was merely the first big step in showcasing the high quality titles that everybody would come to expect from Infocom in the future. But they also showed what captivating and intriguing stories their best writers could weave together… Infocom’s adventures always had original features (That logically never could be utilized outside the text adventure genre.) and a presence that is quite near-impossible to describe using mere words. This includes one distinct Infocom trademark – The subtle line between a good novel and interactive entertainment. (Or maybe “novella” or “novelette” would be a better description since Infocom’s games have anything between 14K-38K words. Zork has a word count of app. 44K, Deadline has 20K, and Starcross lands at 14.6K.) It was always a blessing and a curse. You (usually) can’t get stuck in a novel, but the mental reward for solving a puzzle in a good text adventure after being stuck is pure bliss. It doesn’t quite compare to anything else…

In Infocom’s case, they also implemented a clever form of copy protection – Not on the actual disks, but indirectly via the documentation and the Feelies… (Which nowadays, naturally, can be found archived on the Internet.) Commodore initially co-distributed Infocom’s titles (Suspended and the two concluding Zork-games were the last ones of six in total.) and they were released in two distinct versions – The original ones, and the re-releases from 1983-84. These versions are easily identified by the background- and text color. The original “Commodore”-versions use the C64’s two default blues while the more recognizable “Infocom-colors” are white text on medium gray background. — 1 Player · Keyboard · Disk (Physical + Download)

There are three notable versions of Zork I – The Great Underground Empire in Gamebase64 that may be of interest – The Commodore co-published one that’s “Release 30” (Serial no.: 830330), the 1984 release “Revision 88” (Serial no.: 840726), and the “Solid Gold Edition” from 1987 (With white text on black background.), which is “Release 52”. (Serial no.: 871125) (TOSEC lists at least 30 different versions of this game.)

Trivia: Zork I – The Great Underground Empire can be beaten in app. 300 turns, Zork II – The Wizard Of Frobozz in about 260 turns, and Zork III – The Dungeon Master would be the “shortest” part as it can be finished in 240 turns.

Additional note: If VICE doesn’t load this (or other Infocom-games) try turning “True Drive Emulation” off. (That way you also don’t have to “wait approximately 1.5 minutes”.)

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So what did Commodore themselves publish apart from some classic games and other games like Mole Attack and Money Wars? Under the Commodore Educational Software label, there was a whole bunch of exactly that – Along with quiz- and logical games. (All using the C64’s Basic colors, font, and PETSCII-characters.) And software for those who didn’t only want to play games, but also wished to practice grammar, spelling, maths, and other things straight from the elementary school. (The only difference being of course that after math class at school, you can’t play Avengers unless you go home.) Commodore also published The Visible Solar System for those interested in the space around planet Earth.

What else happened during the C64’s infancy? Comm*Data Computer House, Inc. released three games – The platform game Ape Craze (And the re-release “New Ape Craze”.), Logger (Which is a Frogger-variant.), and Pakacuda. (That’s a Pac Man-clone.) Comm*Data’s career was relatively short lived, though. They returned with a whole bunch of new games in 1983 (For example: Centropods, Escape MCP, and the Pakacuda sequel Supercuda.) before vanishing from the platform the same year.

HESWare (Short for “Human Engineered Software”.) released the two-player only game Retro Ball and proceeded to publish quite a few more or less high quality software between 1983-1985 – Among those: Jeff Minter’s Gridrunner and AMC – Attack Of The Mutant Camels. (Which in fact is another version of Matrix a.k.a. Gridrunner II.)

There is one more publisher worth mentioning: Channel 8 Software. They became mostly known for their graphic text adventures where the pictures were drawn and filled with color in a gradually more and more patience-demanding fashion. In 1982, they released six (!) titles: Arrow Of Death (Part 1 and 2.), Circus, Escape From Pulsar 7, The Golden Baton, and The Time Machine. Five more of these text adventures were released in 1983: Feasibility Experiment, Perseus & Andromeda, Ten Little Indians, Waxworks, and The Wizard Of Akyrz. Meanwhile, Channel 8 Software branched out a little and released a couple of different games and Shoot ‘Em-Ups like Astral Zone, Phase 4, and Timezone. (1984 saw their last of their C64 titles.)

But the path had now been cleared and set. The grounds had been tested. And in 1983, it was time for the new generation of software to take the market by storm.

I personally am definitely beginning to believe that this whole thing is one very long white whale hunt… For that moment… The moment where all the gathered impressions from these games create an 8-bit “Nirvana” or something… And this is where that journey began – Historically speaking…