I think my writings will end up being a mix of fact and recollection... educate and entertain I suppose. Hope you enjoy

Hands up if you had a computer during the 80s. Okay… keep your hand up if you were involved in arguing that your computer was better than the ones owned by your friends. Now… still hold them up if you actually enjoyed such debates. Ah… thought so. You see, that was always the case back then wasn’t it? It didn’t seem all so serious. Nowadays it gets so much trolling, fighting, name calling you’d almost think it was life and death (football aside naturally). One reason is that it is now your money, your justification just in case you could have possibly made the wrong choice over what format to go for. Aside from those rich bastards who are able to afford all the formats that are released. As one half of possibly the most vicious format war that has ever been seen, what was the Commodore 64 made of? First of all however, some small background to the machine itself.

When Commodore bought MOS technology in the late 1970s, they didn’t really know what they had gotten hold of. MOS produced the video and sound chips (VIC and SID) that were eventually used in the C64. Originally when they were designed and due to be manufactured, they were intended for use in some new arcade machine hardware. But Commodore had other ideas for their use, including the follow-up to the Vic20. Indeed there is some arcade tech latency to be found in the C64, many of the secondary chips were also used in boards at the time. So it was to be an arcade machine? Commodore in their infinite wisdom marketed the computer (as they also did with the Amiga) as a business tool. Nice one guys!

So I was in for a bit of shock when venturing down one morning in March 1984 to see a plethora of computer gear all over the dining room table. My parents had sold off the Atari 2600 and games about 6 months previous, their excuse at the time being that they “needed the money”. So it only took this long to figure out where to invest it I suppose. I should really have been wary of why they wanted to keep a couple of the superb Atari joysticks, but then when you witness the loss of your pride and joy (and we did have quite a few games at the time), you don’t tend to remember some of the small details that also go with it. According to dad, the C64 had been bought second hand from a colleague at his work and they had bought a few games to go with it from the shops. So I read the manual because hey, it’s a computer, you don’t just plug and play, fiddled a bit, plopped a tape into the deck and pressed LOAD. A few minutes later, the screen erupted in sound and the immortal word shouted out from the speaker: “GHOSTBUSTERS!”. Whoa… speech, funky music, good graphics and colour, hey I could get to like this. More games soon followed including Cuthbert in the Jungle, The Hobbit, Manic Miner, Impossible Mission and Jeff’s Matrix. Each one offered something more than what I’d previously seen on that other format at the time.

You see, we’d been in our present house for about a year at the time the C64 was acquired. About 6 months after we moved in, a new family also moved in 2 doors down from us. And their son, who was about a year or so younger than myself, had brought with him what would turn out to be the rival format: the Sinclair Spectrum 48k. So in the months in between losing the 2600 and gaining the C64, I found myself quite often over at his place trying out some of these new fangled computer games, especially ones on a home grown computer. Despite having rather a limited palette, the Spectrum seemed like a huge leap over what I had seen with the 2600. And the games were pretty good to boot! Atic Atac, Jetpac, and other Ultimate titles, the Horace games and so forth… keep us occupied for quite a while. Admittedly I did get jealous, where was my computer to play such games on? Of course I wasn’t to know just around the corner, my question was about to be answered.

I get the impression another reason my parents chose the C64 over the Spectrum is because of the keyboard. You know how parents can get at times, they don’t like anything unconventional or unusable. The flat Speccy rubber keyboard or something that looked like a proper typewriter. Somewhere along the line that choice was made way before I knew anything about getting a new computer. There are not many things you truly thank your parents for, but this was one of them now looking back over the mists of time.

So once the C64 was safely in my possession (minus the 15 minute odd wait for Manic Miner from time to time), then I invited said neighbour round to try out some of my games. I think at that point he got a little jealous as well due to the colour and sound superiority of the C64. Now I have nothing personal against the Spectrum now, for it did really have some great games in its library. But when you’re 10 or 11, you tend to be a bit more, well argumentative. So for a while things were somewhat daubed in one-upmanship, as the latest games came out and we’d use them as fodder for demonstration that our machine was the better one. We were still the best of friends, but when it came to our computers, the claws were out.

When Elite was released on the major formats in mid 1985, he got his copy first. His parents were quite well off and were able to buy it for him. £15 indeed… a lot of money back then. I’d already tried out the BBC version courtesy of another friend and so had high hopes that our versions would be able to trounce this supposed lesser format. So we huddled up and did some playing, exploring, trading and fighting. The Speccy version was quite good, not quite as good as the Beeb, but as near enough as we could hope for it to be. I managed to borrow a copy of the C64 version from someone at school and hastily loaded it up when I got home. Title page came up and the music started playing. Okay, not too bad so far but why are all the vectors flicking about and a bit, well slow? I started a game, left the station and started to do my first trading run. Soon a couple of pirates were appearing, so it was time to go shoot them down with my little cannon. Except then the game started to slow down, the frames were jerking, I couldn’t hit them properly and it was starting to get frustrating. The illusion was shattered. The Commodore 64, MY machine, had an Achilles heel. It couldn’t do vectors properly. Naturally I wasn’t going to let such information be known by my friend. I returned said copy to my school chum without him actually knowing I’d played it. I merely explained I couldn’t try the C64 version because it was too expensive to be bought. I finally got my own copy of the game about 5 years later. Looking at it in hindsight, it was okay, but at the time it just didn’t match up to what I wanted it to be.

Having also then tried out several other vector games on the C64 and finding them much to be in the same boat as Elite, I was to say a little downhearted. Here was something that my friend could easily laud over me as why the Speccy was better. Until a few months later and a little program called Mercenary appeared on the horizon. I’d played a bit of Encounter at that point (although I didn’t own it) so having seen what Mr Woakes could do, was hopeful that this game would also be as good. “As good” being a huge understatement as it turned out. At last, a program to show my Speccy friend that yes, the C64 could do vectors! They were clean, crisp, fast moving and most importantly, very, very white in colour. The game itself tagged on top of it was not bad either

Hooray for Mercenary, hooray for Novagen and hooray for Mr Woakes, my computer was saved at last.

Of course it couldn’t last forever. 3D adventures were all the rage and my friend was already happily showing off Knight Lore, Alien 8 and the other Ultimate produce. Fortunately Ocean saw it wise to convert Head Over Heels to the other 8-bit formats, and once again I was able to show that the C64 could do anything you threw at it. True, it wasn’t quite as good as the old Speccy version in hindsight, but you don’t care about such technicalities when you’re young, you just want it to do the bloody thing right. Around that time, the Spectrum was starting to show its age, especially when it came to arcade conversions and the C64 was steaming ahead in the stakes. There were still good Speccy games to be had, but programmers sometimes forgot what the machine could and couldn’t do in those circumstances. Likewise with the C64, Space Harrier was a technical marvel considering the arcade original, but still a dire piece of gaming.

And then around the start of 1990, my Speccy owner friend moved away to a different part of the country and a new life. And so I lost the chance to see what programs made it to the format in the last few years of its life. All that is left is to try them out on emulators, which to be honest, is never going to be as good as the real thing. I never saw or spoke to my Speccy friend again. I wonder where he is now, and what he is up to…? Hopefully looking back at the times we did have together, arguing over games. And maybe, just maybe, he still has his computer and games tucked away in the loft…

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