Chapter 2: The Arcade Game Machine (and Beyond)
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Wizard of Wor – the Arcade comes home
Page 72: The 1983 C64 version of Wizard of Wor was published by Commodore, and converted from a 1980 arcade game by Bally-Midway. The game illustrates the core features of the C64 for creating any maze-based arcade game, using sprites for most moving objects, creating the maze from custom-designed characters, and representing the astronaut "lives" using characters.
How to Make Arcade Games on the C64
Page 74: How can we make a scrolling game? In BASIC, smooth scrolling is impossible, as a BASIC program will take several seconds to move all the characters on the screen.
Page 76: Machine language is 500 or 1000 time faster than BASIC. To create a horizontally scrolling game, we need move the screen one pixel at a time using the scroll register, and move the characters on the screen every 8th pixel. We can use the VIC-II’s convenient facility for detecting whether a sprite has collided with characters or other sprites. The game can be made in a few pages of machine language programming, and the C64 thus lends itself easily to all kinds of games based on moving objects (sprites), scrolling or non-scrolling backgrounds, and sound. Play with WASD keys. (Source code.)
A Machine for high-quality Graphics and Sound
Page 78: In a famous early US game, an overly dramatic voice greets you, "Stay a while, stay forever!" Impossible Mission (1984) (conspicuously easy to confuse with the Mission: Impossible film franchise) is a platform game best known for its initial voice sample. It exemplifies a US C64 game with high production values and a Hollywood-inspired setting. The voice sample was shocking because the C64 was not known to play samples.
Page 79: Summer Games (1984), and its successors Summer Games II (1985), Winter Games (1985), Winter Games (1985) and California Games (1987) were defining games of the early C64 period, all developed by US Epyx Games. In the original Summer Games, several things stand out: Though the game is completely different than Impossible Mission, it has similarities in being from the same publisher, in the multiple sprites used for the main character, in the heroic roles that players take on, and in the high production values that impressed reviewers and buyers of the time. Both games also expand the length of a play session far beyond the arcade.
A Machine for Surreal Games you cannot find in Arcades
Page 82: UK developer Jeff Minter demonstrated a love for arcade game tropes but combined with surreal or mundane settings. In his 1984 Hover Bovver, you are tasked with mowing your lawn. You do this by borrowing the lawnmower of your neighbors one by one. The game features arcade game tropes like an energy meter, synth sounds, and flashing colors, but the actions we perform are no longer our regular arcade actions of fight or flight. Play with cursor keys.
A Machine for Action-Adventure Platform Games
Page 85: There is a UK platform game tradition, which starts with Matthew Smith’s highly successful 1983 Manic Miner, a brutally difficult game for the ZX Spectrum, converted to the C64 and other platforms. Manic Miner shows the beginning of when home computer action games diverged from the arcade tradition.
Page 87: The Monty Mole series, starting with the 1984 Wanted: Monty Mole, is a case study in the arcade-adventure tradition. The C64 version title screen text explicitly instructs us to "REMEMBER ITS NOT JUST A PLATFORM GAME ITS AN ADVENTURE." The idea of combining action and adventure games is often ascribed to the 1980 Adventure for the Atari 2600, but the combination of platform games and exploration has much been later named MetroidVania, from the 1986 Metroid and Castlevania games for the NES, even though these came out several years after the home computer games here.
Page 88: The 1985 Monty on the Run is the better remembered game in the Monty Mole series, ostensibly about Monty navigating a world of connected screens, a strange world of mundane objects, the glass moving back and forth; the smiling monster moving up and down. There was a significant difference between the Spectrum and C64 versions of Monty on the Run though: the music.
A Machine for Music: The Emotional Heart of the C64
Page 89: Music, hard to demonstrate in a book, was for many users a central attraction of the C64. Music ripped from games was circulated independently from the games where they originated, like the 1985 Close to Me collection combining music from Monty on the Run and Crazy Comets.
Page 91: Oscilloscope representation of the Monty on the Run music, each line illustrating one hardware voice. The same hardware voice can switch between different waveforms, here from noise to pulse wave. It is harder to see, but the two top pulse waves are manipulated on the fly and change shape, allowing a voice to change timbre while maintaining the same pitch (sometimes known as synth sweep).
Page 92: Chris Huelsbeck’s 1986 Soundmonitor was, according to one source, “the most popular music editor in Europe of the late 1980s”. It was published in German 64’er Magazin, as 5 full pages of hexadecimal data in small font for readers to type in.
A Machine for Scrolling Games
Page 94: The 1983 International Soccer was one of the more successful games developed by Commodore. It is one of the early games to use smooth scrolling properly (Commodore developers likely had access to the full documentation).
Page 93-94: Boulder Dash, originally developed for Atari 8-bit computers, was an early C64 favorite in which you must collect a set number of diamonds per level before making it to the exit. The physics of falling objects felt revolutionary at the time. Physics engines were not common in 1984, and the inclusion of gravity and falling objects that interacted in a puzzle environment felt new. One review describes the rocks as “positively Newtonian.”
Page 95: The 1985 Paradroid (Figure 66) by Andrew Braybrook is found on several lists of “the best C64 games of all time”.
A Machine for Multimedia and IPs
Page 99: The Frankie Goes to Hollywood game is interesting in that the game represents a band, the titular 1980s synth-pop band, and has a free and congenial relation to its source. As the manual states, “Frankie has sent you over 60 tasks in your journey from Mundanesville through the Pleasure Dome [sic]”, referring to the band’s first album Welcome to the Pleasuredome.
Not that great a Machine for 3d Games
Page 99-100: The C64 was designed for the 2-dimensional arcade games of 1979-1981, and 3-D graphics were not part of the C64 imaginary. However, during the 1980s, 3-D games started to appear. Elite, one of the best known C64 games in 3-D, originally released for the BBC Micro in 1984, was radical in three ways, two technological, and one in overall structure. Technologically, it was new by showing proper 3-D with hidden lines removed (i.e., objects were opaque), however flickering, and new in its procedurally generated universe, where every solar system and planet has its own description. Structurally, the game was new in its open world structure, where the game didn’t force the player to perform any given task but allowed for freely roaming the large universe.
A Machine for Genre-defying Games
Page 100-101: Though titled a little too directly, Jeff Minter’s 1984 Psychedelia broke entirely with the game format in being a “light synthesizer” with no goal. Use the cursor keys and space to draw, number keys to change mode. According to Minter, “many spliffs were smoked and much Pink Floyd listened to whilst using Psychedelia.”
Page 101: Alongside audiovisual program Psychedelia, two other C64 games played a role for some of the biggest franchises in game history, The Sims and SimCity. The 1987 Little Computer People is based on the conceit that little people live inside your computer.
Page 101-102: Will Wright designed Sim City on the C64, based on his previous game Raid on Bungeling Bay. "The Commodore 64 had these graphic features .. you could have this big scrolling window on a larger world ... I designed that game around the technology, around what you couldn’t do on the Apple II"
The Technical European Games and US Simulation Games
Page 104: International Karate+ , also IK+, is probably the peak of martial arts games for the C64. It followed Way of the Exploding Fist (1985) and the original International Karate (1986). The Australian Way of the Exploding Fist was in turn inspired by the arcade game Karate Champ. IK+ thus wasn’t the first karate game for the C64, but its level of detail and polish stood out.
Page 104: Delta (Fasoulas, 1987) kept the three-lives model from the arcade but used newer techniques for showing sprites in top and bottom border. Almost all moving graphics are sprites, characters are only used for the starfield and for shots.
Page 105: Last Ninja (System 3, 1987) is an isometric arcade-adventure game with puzzles and visual depth, where objects can be partially covered by scenery.
Page 106: Turrican (Rainbow Arts, 1990), one of the last C64 hits, is a German action game with high technical quality and a sense of depth created by animating the background. It also merges the European C64 scrolling action-adventure with the Nintendo action-adventure tradition.
Page 106: Where late European development often focused on smooth and fast-moving graphics inspired by arcade games, US developers were often making technically complex simulation games. Sid Meier’s Pirates! (MicroProse 1987) was one of the most successful.