Category: my publications

My new book, Too Much Fun – The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer

It is real: I am thrilled to announce that my new book, Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer is out today on MIT Press.

Too Much Fun is a book about two central mysteries. First, why is the best-selling Commodore 64 computer absent in many computer and video game histories, and what is the influence of its games from SimCity to IK+ to Paradroid? Second, why did this early computer, destined for a shelf life of just a few years, live so long, and end up being produced from 1982-1994?

Writing Too Much Fun has been an incredible journey with twists and turns. I’ve interviewed Commodore engineers, played the games, read the magazines, learned to program the machine again, and connected with new and old friends on the demoscene. All this just as the Commodore 64 is experiencing a renaissance with new games, operating systems, hardware, and events!

Full of interviews, surprising anecdotes, and color illustrations, Too Much Fun tells an epic story of the C64. Too Much Fun is for anyone interested in computer or game history, in how devices can be made to live longer, and for anyone who had, or didn’t have, a Commodore 64. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

How to get the book: Too Much Fun is available as ebook, from your local independent bookstore, MIT Press, or your favorite online retailer.
The book’s support site has extra material, ads, videos, source code, and emulators. https://www.jesperjuul.net/c64/

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Official description: The surprising history of the Commodore 64, the best-selling home computer of the 1980s—the machine that taught the world that computing should be fun.

The Commodore 64 (C64) is officially the best-selling desktop computer model of all time, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. It was also, from 1985 to 1993, the platform for which most video games were made. But while it sold at least twice as many units as other home computers of its time, like the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, or Commodore Amiga, it is strangely forgotten in many computer histories. In Too Much Fun, Jesper Juul argues that the C64 was so popular because it was so versatile, a machine developers and users would reinvent again and again over the course of 40 years.

First it was a serious computer, next a game computer, then a computer for technical brilliance (graphical demos using the machine in seemingly impossible ways), then a struggling competitor, and finally a retro device whose limitations are now charming. The C64, Juul shows, has been ignored by history because it was too much fun. Richly illustrated in full color, this book is the first in-depth examination of the C64’s design and history, and the first to integrate US and European histories. With interviews of Commodore engineers and with its insightful look at C64 games, music, and software, from Summer Games to International Karate to Simons’ BASIC, Too Much Fun will appeal to those who used a Commodore 64, those interested in the history of computing and video games and computational literacy, or just those who wish their technological devices would last longer.

Endorsements

“Jesper Juul has provided a long-needed addition to the Platform Studies series. It’s a wonderful book, as readable as it is informative.”

Jimmy Maher, author of The Future was Here: The Commodore Amiga

“A beautiful, sincere, and rich account of everything that makes this influential computer so special to me: that unique punk stew of technology, creativity, culture, people, and zeitgeist.”

Gary Penn, editor of Zzap!64; inaugural Games Media Legend; author of Sensible Software 1986–1999; Creative Director at DMA Design

“In this standout contribution to the Platform Studies series, Juul illuminates the overlooked career of the Commodore 64 home computer by integrating the perspectives of hardware designers, marketeers, game programmers, demo creators, and retrocomputing enthusiasts.”

Thomas Haigh, lead author of ENIAC in Action and A New History of Modern Computing

“As someone who has a wealth of knowledge on this subject, this book is ‘highly recommended reading,’ so do not hesitate—just buy this book and rejoice.”

David John Pleasance, musician, former Managing Director, Commodore UK, author of Commodore: The Inside Story

Scheduled book talks

The History of the Commodore 64 in Twelve Objects #2: 10 PRINT “HELLO”

On the occasion of my upcoming book Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer, I am writing The History of the Commodore 64 in Twelve Objects, posted weekly from November 1st, 2024:

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

Try making your own 10 PRINT program on the book’s website:

https://www.jesperjuul.net/c64/history/#obj2

Coming November 15th, Object #3: “We Promise You Won’t Use the Commodore 64 More than 24 Hours a Day” – Commodore 64 ads

 

 

My upcoming book, Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer

I am happy to announce that I have finished the page proofs for my new book, Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer. Coming on December 10th, 2024. Feel free to preorder!

I will post more as we get closer to the publication date.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549516/too-much-fun/

Handmade Pixels: The Sam Roberts Interview

For Handmade Pixels, I interviewed some really interesting people in indie games. The interviews are excerpted in the book, but I am slowly putting the full interviews online.

Handmade Pixels is about the history of (the idea of) indie games, and these 2017-2018 interviews provide a window into the thinking at the end of the 20-year time span the book covers.

Here is my interview with Sam Roberts, festival director of IndieCade, where we discuss IndieCade and film festivals, the meaning of indie, and the fear of missing the Next Big Thing.

https://www.jesperjuul.net/handmadepixels/interviews/roberts.html

 

New Paper: The Game of Video Game Objects

I have a new paper out, just presented at the CHI Play’21 conference:

“The Game of Video Game Objects: A Minimal Theory of When We See Pixels as Objects Rather than Pictures.” In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. CHI PLAY ’21. https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameofobjects/ 

We’ve discussed immersion (for and against), but I argue that we’ve overlooked a much more fundamental question: Why and when do we think of pixels on the screen as objects, rather than as pictures of objects?

During the pandemic, I built a game for exploring this question and wrote an accompanying essay. This extends my previous paper Virtual Reality: Fictional all the Way Down (and that’s OK).

The game presents a series of game objects, and asks the player to consider their status:

  1. When would you describe something as an object, rather than a picture?
  2. When do you think of it as the type of object it represents – like a rock or a lamp?
  3. And when would you argue that an onscreen object is the type of object it claims to be, such as a calculator?

The conclusion is not just that games and VR are cultural forms (obviously), but that we judge game objects based on what we are trying to use them for, and game worlds are always designed for particular kinds of uses. And we know this. There thus can be no universal metaverse, only different worlds built for different purposes.

From the abstract:

“While looking to the future, we have overlooked what is right before us. With new technology, haptics, rendering, virtual reality, we have spent much energy discussing immersion and presence, thinking sometimes about current technology, but often about a hypothetical perfect experience or future perfect technology.

In this, we have forgotten something rather fundamental: How do we in the first place decide to see a group of pixels on a screen as an object to which we have access, rather than as a picture of an object? This paper explores this question through a playable essay. At first, we may think that we will identify anything interactive as an object, but the playable essay demonstrates that this is much more complex and pragmatic, and that this identification has three steps – identifying pixels as an object rather than a picture, reasoning about the object as a specific type of object (such as a ball), and identifying it as a real instance of a type of object (such as a calculator).”

Thanks to IVD at The Royal Danish Academy, Nick Montfort, Stefano Gualeni, Pawel Grabarczyk, Dooley Murphy, and Jan-Noël Thon for comments; to Andrés Cabrero Rodríguez-Estecha for visual design; Stephane Bersot for the calculator asset. The project was made with Unity3D and Low Poly Game Kit by JayAnAm.

It took 1000 hours to write my book Handmade Pixels

I was waiting for the pandemic to blow over before thinking about time management again, but it looks like there will be no simple global endpoint, so here goes. I hope this is useful for other potential writers.

How long does it take to write a book? I must confess I had no idea, but writing Handmade Pixels took me 1000 hours over the course of 4½ years. I had already written a paper on independent games in 2014, but it wasn’t until August 2015 that I decided to write the book that became Handmade Pixels.

Associate professor jobs like mine with dedicated research time are unfathomably privileged and increasingly scarce, yet even people like me will complain of not having time to do research. I use a time tracker to figure out where my time goes, and this lets me see how much time I spent on this book. It’s not an exact science – sometimes I’d work on something else that drifted into the project, and sometimes I’d be interrupted while working.

Results: I clocked a total of 983 hours which were distributed like this (click to zoom):Bar chart showing hours spent per monthAs you can see, only 2/3 of the time was spent in the earnest book-writing phase – after signing a contract and before publishing. Especially copyediting, proofs, and promotion took much more time than you’d intuitively expect.

To my surprise, most of the time I only just managed to work on the book around 20-30 hours a month. My contract technically says that I can (should/should be able to) research 60 hours per month, but I only exceeded that twice. For most months, there were apparently always enough other things happening for me to spend that much time on the book.

This is also the largest book project I’ve done, and I surely couldn’t have done it without my assistant Dooley Murphy, or without the good support of MIT Press and my editor Doug Sery.

Finding the time

I was positively unsure if I could write this book on my regular work schedule. My first three books were all written on considerable chunks of free time (Half-Real: my PhD, A Casual Revolution: 6 months off, Art of Failure: a 6-month grant), so could I even write a book during my regular schedule of teaching, meeting, supervising, and being the head of an educational program? I also have kids, and my productivity drops vertically if I am sleep-deprived, so working late does not make me more productive.

After a million days of never getting to the research I cared about, I’ve settled on the classic writer routine:

  1. Go to the office.
  2. Get a cup of coffee.
  3. Write till noon without checking email or social media.
  4. Let the world of emails and meetings wash over me.

This was the best choice imaginable. Of course, it wasn’t always possible to evade other responsibilities in the morning – there were lots of days where I failed – but it at least felt like a pattern, and let me get a continuity of working on the project almost every workday. I probably did around 10 late nights for the entire project, and none after midnight. Not because I didn’t have to, but simply because staying up late would make me miserable without speeding up the project at all.

Motivation

Some people have asked me how I find the motivation to not go on social media or do other short-term tasks when I am supposed to write, and I am not always successful at that. I do find it useful though to think very hard about how a given activity makes me feel: if I randomly go on social media or check email, it makes me feel terrible & life feel meaningless, while starting my day with research makes me feel great and my life feel meaningful. (There is a good podcast on thinking about “how does it make you feel“.) It’s a bit like the idea of getting drunk on champagne in the morning – on some level it sounds great, but in practice you know it will feel terrible. So you try to do the thing that will make you feel better.

Structure

Writing is often very solitary, so habits are very idiosyncratic. I personally don’t have daily goals like word counts, but I have very long TODO lists, describing things I need to read, games I need to play, screenshots I need to take, interviews I need to edit, paragraphs that need to be linked, arguments that need to be sharpened, and so on. For a writing session, I just want to check off some checkboxes. I keep the list of checked tasks around so I can see my progress. I also make new tasks just to check them.

Fast or slow?

Is 1000 hours fast or slow? I really have no idea. I am probably somewhere in the middle. I know of writers faster than me, and writers who take more time than I do.

This is what I learned from writing Handmade Pixels. If you want to write, I hope there will be time for you to do so as well.