In the 80s, pirates’ colours were yellow and black

When you’re fourteen years old with a lovely new Commodore 64, you don’t really give much thought to piracy and the effect that it has on the industry. You just want lots of new games for your lovely new system. Of course, when you’re a spotty teenager and new to computers, you don’t usually have access to cracker groups or vast quantities of pirate games. You do, however, have several 64 owning friends. Often these will be borrowed, but equally often they will be pirate copies, and what better storage medium than the Boots C15 cassette?

Boots the Chemist – schoolkid-friendly High Street chain, or evil
encourager of software pirates? You decide.

When you think about it, the only reason Boots could have manufactured the C15 was for piracy. I suppose you could have taped a couple of songs from the radio on each side, but a four-song tape isn’t of any use to anyone. Besides, that’s what C90s were for. They can’t have been naïve enough to think people would save their own programs on a C15, either. Nope, the C15 was the average schoolkid’s affordable ticket to more games. You could fit one game on each side quite comfortably, sometimes two, and if it was a multiload you could fit the main data on one side and the levels on the other. Perfect.

A 90 minute tape. Not good for pirated games. Too much rewinding
and fast-forwarding, y’see?

C15 cassettes were dead cheap too. You could buy a new game each weekend with your pocket money and paper round/milk round money, and still have enough change for a couple of these black and yellow beauties. Generally speaking you’d have four good friends that would all be doing the same thing, so each weekend you would get five games for just over the price of one. That’s a pretty nifty result in anyone’s terms.

Of course, the C15 was loved by all. It wasn’t a Commodore owners’ exclusive by any means. Whatever your home computer, the C15 was just enough to satisfy your weekly needs. Whether you owned a C64, a Spectrum, an Amstrad, and MSX or something even less popular, the chances are you had a few black and yellow cassettes lying around, all stuffed with up to four games each.

Typing “C15” into Google Images turns up everything but a Boots C15 cassette. This is one of them, you’ll have
to make do with it.

I remember my storage system vividly, even today. Disks, large cardboard boxes or double cassette boxes went in my bottom drawer, single cassette box originals in one carry case and Boots C15s in a second carry case. I used capital letters when I was writing the game names on each box, so they would look nice and neat, and they really looked quite stylish, all neatly tucked away in that carry case.

Sadly, this all came to an end when the new breed of machines came along. Cassettes were outdated and impractical, and disks were the standard format for home computers. There just wasn’t a place for those 15-minute tapes any more. I kept the ones I had, of course as I still used my Commodore 64, even with other machines around. In fact, when I moved out of my parents’ home in 2000, my dad was still finding them and it pained me to hear he’d chucked the lot out.

These disk-driven machines were responsible for the death of the C15. Bastards.

It’s hard to say “bye-bye” to a large part of your history when you’re 4000 miles away (Dad's in England, I'm in the US). You don’t even get a sense of closure, and when you’re dealing with your past you really need that. I’ve had to mourn the loss of my old stuff from afar, and even though we’re just talking about bits of plastic, it’s actually painful to do.

Nowadays I’m not really interested in pirated games. I only own one, and that’s because I was given it, and I’m actively trying to find an original copy of it anyway. I know now that it’s really stealing, which isn’t nice, but mainly I think it’s that I just like to own stuff. If it’s good enough for me to want to have, then I’ll buy it, if not, then I won’t own it at all, in any shape or form. And anyway, pirated games just don’t have the same appeal when they’re not on one of those black and yellow C15 cassette tapes.

PAULEMOZ, April 2004.

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