A History of the Commodore 64 in Twelve Objects
Inspired by the BBC's A History of the World in 100 Objects, I am writing A History of the C64 in Twelve Objects, posted weekly from November 1st, 2024.
Object #1: The Commodore 64 itself
The Commodore 64 is known affectionately as the breadbox for its shape. Launched in 1982, following the Commodore company’s successful VIC-20 computer (1980). At 12,5 million units sold, the C64 was by far the best-selling home computer of the era, and it was also the platform with the most video games from 1985 to 1993 – 5,500 games are known.
But there is a mystery: there are both computer and video game histories that never mention the machine. My new book tries to find out why. I have tried to write the best book I could about the C64, but this was also my own first computer, and revisiting it has been thrilling and full of surprises.
The C64’s longevity went beyond any expectation – home computers were known to have a short life span, and already in 1983 Sierra game developer Ken Williams was spreading the rumor that production was about to cease, yet the machine was produced until 1994.
Strangely, none of its three central chips were originally designed for a computer. The 6510 (6502) CPU was originally planned for control systems, the SID sound chip was designed for synthesizers, and the VIC-II graphics chip was originally planned for video game devices. This became the C64, combining state-of-the art graphics and sound with strange flaws, such as a limited BASIC programming language and slow tape and disk drive.
Though Commodore never updated the machine functionally, users and developers fixed its flaws and kept finding new ways to use it. In the book, I call this the five lives of the machine. The European box shows the first life – a serious computer for work, studying, and the home, and for programming in BASIC.
Object #2: 10 PRINT “HELLO”: GOTO 10
Turning on the Commodore 64 launches us into a comforting interface in dark and light blue colors. It is a machine where interface, programming, and housekeeping take place using the same BASIC programming language. We can type immediate commands such as:
?10+20
30
READY.
BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Code), originally developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in the early 1960s, was designed to make computing universally accessible, at first for Dartmouth students. BASIC became a central platform for games in the 1960s and 1970s, and David Ahl's book BASIC Computer Games (1973) compiled and distributed the games made in computer labs on paper, the only viable form of mass-market program distribution of the time. One central early aspect of Commodore 64 culture was to type in pages and pages of programs from manuals, magazines, and books.
I think a core joy of programming is that we can make the computer do sustained work for us. The Commodore 64 User’s Guide coming with the machine encourages us to make a program printing “COMMODORE 64”, but the text was almost always the user’s name.
10 PRINT “HELLO!”:GOTO 10
Feel free to make your own 10 PRINT program in this emulator.
The next step was often to change the colors on the fly, and creatively making your mark on store or computer lab machines was an ongoing sport - a competition of ingenuity, speed, and presence:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); :POKE 646,RND(1)*16:GOTO 10
Writing programs like this, the one-liner, became an entire genre of programming onto itself. The User’s Guide also suggests this maze-making program, which randomly prints left- and right-leaning lines which form a maze on the computer screen:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 is dedicated to this program and discusses the history of one-liners. A more recent variation of the one-liner maze is here.
Later computers became easier to use, with icons, mouse, and windows, but the connection to programming was also lost, and today, sadly, computers no longer encourage us to fill the screen using small programs.
PS. Is 10 PRINT "HELLO!" an object? I think so!
Object #3: "We promise you won't use the Commodore 64 more than 24 Hours a Day" - advertising
Who is the Commodore 64 for? In the 1985 ad “We Promise you won’t use the Commodore 64 More than 24 Hours a Day”, the Commodore 64 is for the whole family, divided into familiar roles, and the machine guarantees the family’s safety and unity. Research assistant Laurel Carney at MIT pointed out that the text, “It’s 8 a.m. Do you know where your daughter is”, echoes a 1960s-80s US public service announcement scaring parents to keep tabs on the whereabouts of their children, “Do you know where your children are?” In the ad, worries about safety speaks for getting a computer – because the computer is so addictive, the whole family will be kept safely home, with dad (who seems to get very little sleep) doing both office work and stocks, the son playing games and doing homework, the younger daughter solving puzzles, the elder daughter studying the solar system, and mom looking up recipes and managing the household with a database.
Though Commodore lacked a global advertising strategy and left it to individual countries come up with their own, there was an early global pattern of focusing on the serious side of the C64, and only mentioning games as an aside.
Compare the previous ad to this: The most referenced ad today is probably the Australian "Are you Keeping up with the Commodore", famous for its catchy jingle, the implied threat that you may will fall behind if you don't have the computer, and the bizarre hand gesture from the C64 users.
In many European countries, Commodore gradually accepted the machine's status as a game computer and began to advertise it as such. This circa 1987 Swedish ad makes fun of apparently delinquent youths. "Where have you been? Out. What did you do? Nothing," with the C64 being the better alternative, young people enjoying playing video games together. The acceptance of games also made it into the C64 packaging, sometimes themed around bundled games like Batman.
Such computer ads also had the feature that the dedicated computer owner – like me! – liked the ads because it said positive things about their computer in a public space. I did feel aligned with the Commodore company at the time and wanted to see more and better C64 ads.
Object #4: Impossible Mission and Tapes
Another Visitor. Stay a while, stay forever!
The hammy voice of the evil scientist greets the player. The 1984 Impossible Mission by Dennis Caswell at Epyx was a technical marvel when it came out.
The “Another Visitor” sample and the “Destroy Him by Robots!” sample were shocking because the Commodore 64 did not have any facility for playing sampled sound. The sample was played by quickly changing the volume of the sound chip, creating clicks of different volume. The animation, based on pictures from a book about athletics, was fluid and expressive, combining multiple high-resolution sprites of different color.
Sound and graphics were amazing and high tech, exploiting and showcasing your C64’s abilities, making it the game you would show visiting friends to cement that yes, the C64 was the most advanced game platform.
The game, on the other hand, was painfully difficult. You die constantly by falling down, running out of time, or merely grazing an enemy robot. This was normal. Yet Impossible Mission was also inspired by Rogue, and the layout of the levels was randomized at every playthrough, which did not really become mainstream until the release of Spelunky in 2008.
Impossible Mission came on tapes or floppy disks. The exciting-looking box evoked sci-fi and the cold war and the pictures were – as everybody understood – nothing like the actual game. Inside the box was a manual, as was the custom, and the tape itself.
To play the game, you’d put the tape into Commodore Datasette deck, rewinding the tape before typing “LOAD” and pressing play.
(Photo by Evan-Amos, public domain).
Most users also had stacks of regular audio tapes onto which pirated software had been recorded, and the little counter on the Datasette was paramount for finding the location where the game was stored, noting the location on the tape inlay. If you had a tape deck, you would do this a lot.
(Imgur)
Some radio stations even broadcast C64 programs on air, giving a wall of modem-like screeches to be recorded on a regular tape recorder, and then inserted in the Datasette.
Object #5: Zzap!64 and other Magazines
On the magazine cover, a spaceship swoops across the glowing city, laser beams across the sky summarily disposing of enemy crafts. Zzap!64 was the preeminent UK Commodore 64 game magazine, launched in 1985, published until 1994 ( “Commodore Force” in the end), and reanimated as commemorative issues and annuals from 2002 and onwards.
Early covers, by artist Oliver Frey, borrowed from the world of fantasy posters, obviously not referring to the actual images on the computer screen, but to the imagined worlds of games and computers. Frey’s covers often commented on the games reviewed (as in Dropzone on this cover).
Why magazines? Obviously pre-internet, and absent widespread use of BBSs, magazines were the news sources and the public sphere of games and computers. At launch, Zzap!64 declared itself to be a pure C64 game magazine free of four things: free of other computers, non-game applications, nerdy programming, and type-in program listings. (All made their way into the magazine over the years.)
Loved for its cheeky, very UK irreverence where it is impossible to write even a single image caption without some twist, the magazine promoted its young reviewers, whose cartoon images would appear with speech bubbles, giving personal and sometimes contradicting opinions on games.
Commodore 64 games were usually so challenging as to be impossible – playtesting was not yet formalized or required – and especially European magazines regularly published cheat codes in the form of programs and POKEs that would modify the game program, making the games playable and completeable after all.
US Compute’s Gazette (1993-1990/95) was the magazine for the serious computer user – accommodating games, yes, but neither giving too much space to game reviews, nor going overboard with technical tricks. I think of Compute’s Gazette as the truly respectable of the magazines here.
German 64’er Magazin (1984-1996) was also a general C64 magazine, covering everything from word processors (“how to use the C64 instead of a typewriter”) to music, games, and programming. 64’er was far more technical than Zzap!64 or Compute’s Gazette, covering the demoscene, discussing graphical tricks in detail, and featuring classified ads that early on offered clearly pirated software.
As the only viable mass distribution channel for software, 1980s magazines featured interminable program listings for the user to type in, offering free software at the cost of typing and proofreading, but also offering the bonus of learning about programming.
Magazines were your source for what was going on, for what to buy, how to program, how to talk about the games, and how to cheat.
Object #6: Wizball and other Scrolling Games
What even is the 1987 game Wizball (Sensible Software)? With glowing reviews and a spot on many “best C64 games ever”-lists, in this game you are a wizard wrapped in a ball, at first hard to control, but gradually acquiring new skills and a cat companion. The world has lost its color, and your job is to collect colors, making the world whole and properly saturated.
Like many early C64 games, it is unclear what genre the game belongs to. This horizontally scrolling game is a bit like Defender in its shooting, but more like an action-adventure platformer in the way you traverse the world and collect objects. Like other C64 games, it is famous for its music, this one by Martin Galway.
The Commodore 64 came out in 1982, and the first smoothly scrolling games followed in 1983 (International Soccer, Son of Blagger, Neoclyps, and Wanted: Monty Mole). When did PCs have smoothly scrolling games then? This is usually said to be ID Software’s 1990 Commander Keen. IBM appears to have made a conscious decision not to add game-related features, and hence THE PC WAS NEARLY A DECADE BEHIND.
Along with the Atari 8-bit computers, the C64 could do what its main competitors (ZX Spectrum, Apple II, IBM PC, Amstrad) could not: The C64 video chip, the VIC-II, allowed for games that smoothly scrolled around a larger world. “Scrolling” is not a genre today, but the scrolling facility allowed for the early C64 tradition of action-adventure games and action-adventure platformers (predating say Nintendo’s games by many years).
The 1983 Wanted: Monty Mole instructed players to REMEMBER IT’S NOT JUST A PLATFORM GAME ITS AN ADVENTURE, emphasizing the newness of combining action with exploration. The C64 hardware thus enabled a whole subgenre of action-adventure games.
When European developers later made games of open exploration, say Grand Theft Auto, it was not surprising, as these were the kind of games they had grown up on.
What scrolling games do you remember?
Object #7: The SID Chip – Commodore 64 Music
It is said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but nevertheless: The 6581 SID (Sound Interface Device) chip of the Commodore 64 was designed by Robert Yannes in 1981. According to Yannes, he was inspired primarily by synthesizers, hoping to create a chip for use in other musical instruments.
In practice, the SID chip became the sound chip of the Commodore 64 and has the magical quality that it still sounds modern after 43 years. Why? Because it encapsulates the classic analog synth sound of simple waveforms (pulse, triangle, sawtooth, noise) played with an ADSR envelope, controlling the fade in and out of a particular note. There are also filters and ring modulation facility. The SID chip was an unusual combination of digital and analog components, and different versions and individual chips sound different. Just like analog synthesizers.
Though Yannes had hoped for more voices, time and physical constraints reduced the 6581 to three simultaneous voices (though developers later figured out how to play samples as well). The limited voices gave C64 music its characteristic fast and rhythmic arpeggio style, where chords are played by quickly playing its constituent notes in turn.
Oscilloscope view of Rob Hubbard’s Monty on the Run music.
Rob Hubbard’s Monty on the Run music is among the more famous pieces of C64 music, developing over time, and switching between impressions of different instruments. European video game orchestra events will often include Monty on the Run.
Danish Broadcasting Corporation Symphony Orchestra C64 game medley
As C64 programming advanced, the famous composers, including Rob Hubbard, Jeroen Tell, Chris Hülsbeck, Ben Daglish, and Johannes Bjerregaard, learned to modify the properties of the individual voice on the fly, such that a given note could be a combination of multiple waveforms, or perhaps pitch bend or feature vibrato. As the image shows, individual voices were used to combine many waveforms, giving the expressive quality of later C64 music.
C64 game music was also distributed separately, ripped, from the original games they came from, and the C64 thus served as a media distribution platform before there was anything like MP3s.
Object #8: Floppy disk (with pirated games)
These two floppy disks came with a second-hand Commodore 64. Such flat objects for storing programs were called “floppies” because they were easily bendable, as opposed to fixed disks, and hence quite fragile. 5 ¼” was a common type of floppy disk, shared with IBM PCs and many other computers. As was common, this second-hand C64 had a collection of disks (twenty) with pirated material, and only two pieces of original software.
The 1541 disk drive. Photo by Evan-Amos.
Compared to tapes, such disks were the more expensive storage option for C64s, the 1541 disk drive often costing as much as the computer itself. Already with their first computer, the PET, Commodore had decided that devices should be connected to computers using USB-like cables, rather than through opening the computer and installing hardware. This was an elegant and surprisingly modern solution but also made the devices quite expensive, as they needed to be small computers by themselves.
To read the fragile disks, the 1541 disk drive often needed to do a “head alignment”, where the disk drive adjusted itself by banging the head against an internal stop, giving a surprisingly violent loud sound. To be a C64 disk drive owner was to live with and listen to the recurring sounds of the drive.
According to the label on these particular floppy disks, the disks originated from a course in WordPerfect for IBM PCs (“WP Kursus” 1-2) and were only later appropriated for less "serious" C64 use. The paper sleeve lists the software: Donald Duck’s Playground, Duck Shoot, Falcon Patrol, Frogger, Ghost ‘n Goblins, Grand Prix. Piracy was pervasive on the C64.
There were two types of floppy disks: single- and double sided, the latter being more expensive, but it quickly became known that you could cut a little notch in the side of a floppy, allowing you to use both sides of the cheap disk.
This was part of the impetus behind this history of the C64 through objects : Owning a C64 was an intensely tangible & physical activity. With floppy disks, to be a C64 owner was also to be adept with scissors.
Coming December 27th: Object #9 – Final Cartridge - fixing the C64's flaws