MADE Forum: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64
So, yeah, so the reason for this talk is that I have a new book out called Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64. And just to get to give a bit of background for who I am. So as we' said, I'm basically a video game theorist. So previously to this, I have written four books about video games.
So one about the meaning of rules and fiction in games, one about the meaning of small games, one about, as I was just mentioned, the pain of playing video games or the question of why do we playing video games, even though they make us unhappy so much of the time And previously to this Handmade Pixels about the Rise of Independent and experiential games. Now we get to my latest book, Too Much Fun, about the Commodore 64, which is a slightly different book. So this is a book about a computer, but of course, about a computer that was famous for its games.
And so this is, in a way, I think you might say the default complete setup of the Commodore 64. So I wrote this book because the Commodore 64 was my first computer, so it's a computer, which steps, I've traversed I tried to explore all the quirks of its chips. I spent a lot of time writing demos or graphical demonstration programs to show off my skills.
I met with other people, I went to demo parties. I slept on the hardwood floors of school auditoriums I also did programs kind of small games with my myself, for myself, and for my friends and sort of participated in a larger culture around the machine, right? And so when I wrote this book, at first I was thinking that that should be the main focus, right? This kind of intense relation to the computer But then while talking to a lot of different people, I realized that different people just had very, very different ideas about what the Commodore 64 was and very different relations to it. And so it became clear that kind of had to be the focus of the book, right? The fact that this kind of now simple machine that was largely unchanged actually could mean a lot of different things to different people. And so the fully stocked machine like this, if you actually use the Commodore 64 a lot, there's the kind of body memory that kicks in, right? So you know what it's like to tap the keys, you remember the sound of the keys? For example? You know what it's like to open a game with like a kind of elaborate card cover to take out the manual and take out the little tape, that goes goes into the cassette.
And you might have had this experience of having these floppy disks with little sleeves, and then writing on on the sleeve word games. in this case, obviously, pirated beams were on the disk. And so you might even have done this thing where, in order to use the back side of the disc, you'd like learn to cut a little hole in the floppy disk and just kind of turn it around And so to me, I think that's actually when people will talk about the Commodore 64, that's often what it's about. This is kind of body memory of the things you've done, right? And it terms of something that whenever you turn on your Commodore 64, and this is an emulator, of course, what you get is this default dark blue screen with the light blue text and the light, I mean border. And the Commodore 64 has these very nice things, you can ask it to do kind of simple maths like this you can, of course, do do a little programs like this, which everybody did, like all all the time, you can you can.
The Commodore 64 had this nice screen editor so you can actually draw draw little things pretty easily on the screen. and you can even change the colors, you can do do little things like this. And so the Commodore 64 in a way is in that way is kind of very friendly, so it's very very open for you. and very open for to which you quickly making things drawing things, quickly making programs and so on. So one thing about the Commodore 64 is that it is officially the best selling home computer of all time. So what does that mean? So during the 1980s, there was a kind of idea that there would be professional computers, like personal computers, and then there would be this other thing called home computers Of the home computers the Commodore 64 sold probably around 12 and a half million units, which is twice as many as in the Apple 2 or the ZX spectrum or the kind of Commodore Amiga.
And I think what's's weird to me is often when you read computer history, that's not super clear, right? So often computer history gets reduced to, say, Apple and Microsoft with a footnote about IBM, or something like like that, right? But actually, the Commodore 64 was the best-selling computer at that time, right? It was also the computer that, for a long period of time, from 1985 to 1993, was the platform, including the console was the platform with the most games, right? This was the largest game library during like almost 10 years, right? And again, like if you read video game history, it's kind of striking that most video game history barely mention it, or at least they intend to focus, 95% of the attention to consoles for some reason And I was thinking perhaps when I was writing this, that, personally this is very different from my own personal experience. So growing up in Northern Europe, definitely the Commodore 64 was the dominant game platform of the time, and I basically did not know anybody who had a home console in the 1980s. It wasn't a thing. right? And so at first, I thought that it might just be that the US experience was kind of very different from the European experience. Well, the funny thing is then if you go back and look at the the literature, for example, there's a paper by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, who talked about when they were making Habitat in 1985 in the U.S., the Commodore of 644
was the mainstay of the recreation computing market, right? So, well, all right, that's different from you, what you might expect. Similarly, like, here's the 1986 graph from Dataquest, which shows Commodore 64 being the dominant home computer manufacturer. So what actually is the case here is that I think even, of course, there's a difference between, say, North American and European computer history, but especially the North Americans seem to have forgotten their own history, right. We can also see this in Mad Magazine. So not only in terms of units sold, but also in terms of cultural Mind share, there's a 1985 Mad Magazine spoof of computer companies which makes fun, not of say IBM or Steve Jobs, but of Commodore, here called Commode.
And the character kind of parodied here is Jack Tremiel, head of Commodore, right. So showing this kind of cultural mind shift that Commodore was ahead of this time, right? And also it makes fun of Commodore's reputation for making overpriced, kind of game machines, right? So the timeline for this is this action, which is that the Commodore 64 was launched in 1982, and at this point, it was pretty new for people to have computers in their home, right? We usually say that started in 1977, right? So it wasn't so clear how long a computer would last. The Commodore 64 was launched in 1982. And actually, even just a year later, Ken Williams of Sierra said that Commodore had plans to discontinue the Commodore 64 in December, 1983, which didn't happen So actually the Commodore 64 was produced until Commodore shut down in 1994. And so that kind of is the question, right? So that is, given that the Commodore 64 didn't change, it wasn't upgraded, it didn't get to get new abilities, how could it actually be so many different things to so many different people for so long? And to get some answers, let's first think about what happened just before the Commodore 64 came out. So in kind of Commodore history, there's a famous meeting in 1980 in London with the Commodore executives and some engineers in London And this is Jack Tramiel, CEO of Commodore, and this is Charlie Peddle, one of the Commodore's engineers and the main designer of the 6502 chip, which also went into the Commodore 64 and lots of other computers.
And at this meeting, Commodore was uncertain about the direction of the company. Should they be making more business machines, or should they be making kind of more mass market machines? And according to the history, Jack Tramiel kind of pounded the table and made the call that Commodore would be making mass market machines for very cheap, which gave a lot of sort of consternation for some of their engineers. And so first, Commodore was launching this machine intending for it to be the predecessor to the Commodore 64, and later the Commodore 64 itself. And so when the Commodore 64 was designed, Al Charpentier an engineer was making a video chip for video game machines, right? And how do you make a video game chip in 1981? Right, so the first thing people did was they actually looked at the existing games at the time. You know, actually the engineers went out to lunch and played arcade games. And at this time, arcade games worked like this, so typically you had some kind of background, which consisted of these little characters like tiles.
And then you had some moving objects in ___ of those backgrounds. And these kind of games typically concern whether these two objects bump into each other or not. Or does an object bump into another object that does it bump into say the background And in a game like Rally X here, the background also scrolls, right? You can move around at a larger world. And so these kind of games or the situation in these games led to a certain amount of the design decisions, you have these kind of character graphics, you can move those around pretty quickly, you have these sprites, which you are placed on top of the character graphics And then you have various kind of hardware facilities for moving the screen smoothly around. And so to be a bit more detailed the way it looks is like this, and there's a background color and then there's a text layer in which you can redefine the little characters and then there's a sprite layer, which has these little eight little moving objects and you can place around the screen, and then you have this border around around the kind of areas of the visible kind of screen. And the border actually becomes kind of surprisingly important at the end.
And so then the thing you can do is to look inside the machine and think about, well, what was this machine for? And when you look at it, then you realize that actually people didn't necessarily agree about what the individual components were for. So the video chip which I was just talking about, was originally a project for making chips for video game machines, not for computers, right? The 6510, which is part of the 6502 family, the CPU was actually really not envisioned to be useful for computers. It was envisioned to be useful for controlling systems or sprinklers or things like this. The sound chip the 6581, was actually originally designed for synthesizers.
So which means that none of the main chips were actually destined to be part of the computer. And so the computer is actually consists of many different ideas about what it should be doing and what it's for And so how can we talk about this? So the way I go about it in the book is to talk about this idea of the imaginaries. So the idea of the imaginaries to say that that, of course, prior to actual space travel, people were thinking about space travel prior to computers, people were thinking about computers, prior to actually having a computer, people were being exposed to these various ideas about what a computer might be.
And so this is to say, when when people design technology or design media this is often almost always based on some imaginary idea of future in which that technology exists. And so that helped me understand a bit better, like what it is that something like the Commodore 64 can do and to realize that in a way, if you talk to different people, the Commodore 64 actually means very different things, right? So if you ask, what is the Commodore 64, both different people at different times, people would have different answers to this, right? So the Commodore 64, in my estimation has five lives, so the first life is a life as a serious computer teaching the BASIC programming language The second life is as an arcade game machine. The third life is as a machine for a kind of computing subculture, which we call the demoscene.
The fourth life is the life where the Commodore 64 feels old and it has to catch up, keep up with newer machines, and the fifth life is where we are now, where it's kind of an internal style, like the limitations of the machine are suddenly kind of fascinating and not a problem anymore. So let's talk about the first line. In this imaginary, so the Commodore 64 is a universal computer for the whole family for business and for education. And it's part of the BASIC programming language, tradition, which comes from John Kennedy, at Durham College, inspired by this vision where you could buy, say, a book with BASIC computer games and you could then type in this entire program into into your computer. In this case, the lunar landing landing game.
And so in way, BASIC was almost like a kind of game platform to itself. And it's also such that when you open the manual, and yeah, I also have one here, the one that comes with the computer it's interesting. It starts saying like how important computer, the computer is, but then it goes very quickly into explaining that you can use the Commodore 64's facilities for making your own your own games. And just to show, what is that like like? So this is like a small BASIC program that shows a balloon.
and then you can see the balloon here is actually something that exists somewhere in the world separately from the characters of text that you place. And this is why it's kind of pretty easy at this point to do something like a maze and have an object move around it, and it's it easy to check and see if the balloon has collided between the maze and other objects and so on. But this also posed a problem, right? Because people and manufacturers were kind of worried about games.
So Apple, as an example in 1985 denied, John Scully from Apple denied that Apple were making home computers, and they asserted that they were making computers for the home instead. And so like, you have to parse this like, what does this actually mean? So the point was that Apple didn't want to be associated with home computers, which were assumed to be cheap machines that you could play games on. Apple were making the Apple II wanted to be a much more serious company. And so this was like, I think the this is from the title of Too Much Fun for the book is that people were generally worried about being associated with games and having the computer being seen as a game computer, which would make it much more difficult for say parents to justify buying it.
And so Commodore often when they promoted the Commodore 64 in the beginning would kind of start mentioning, how serious the Commodore 64 was, in word processing and databases and running spreadsheets, and then there might be, and by the way, you it also has games, but clearly games were not the primary setting point when it was being promoted. And so here's a kind of common quote, somebody explaining that that they wouldn't be able to convince their parents to get a kind of console, but you could convince them to get a Commodore 64. And so that I think, pretty quickly became the dominant imaginary that, yeah, what is the Commodore 64 It became an arcade game machine, right.
And so at first, a machine wor, allowing to play the arcade games at home, and then gradually, when people started getting used to this idea that, well, if you're playing at home, you don't need just three lives, you can have more and so on, then became a machine for going beyond the arcade. And just to give you a sense of some of the kind of famous games, so Summer Games was famous for these kind of very opening ceremonies of Olympics style kind of setting and all these different disciplines. International Karate. was a really good karate game Monty on the Run has this kind of wonderful music. Sim City was originally done on the col64. But then you you have some kind of very strange game, so there's a Frankie Goes to Hollywood game based on this kind of 1980s synth pop band, and you have weird UK games like Bozo's Night Out, which is basically a game about, getting drunk and then having to kind of try to find your way home, right? And I think often what you can see happening is that with console manufacturingacturers were trying to be very professional and say, official quality seals and things like this, at home computer games could afford to be kind of really weird and strange because there was nobody to kind of gatekeep or control what was being made.
Specifically, I think there's a long, like there's kind of aCommodore 64 arcade game tradition. And so you take games like Manic Miner or Monty Mole or again, Monty on the Run. And so there's a specific thing in the UK actually that there's a lot of mining games during on Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, there were these large mining strikes, miner strikes in the UK.
And that actually really made into a lot of these games, even though they were really deeply surreal It starts a tradition that kind of later carries onto a game like kind of Turrican, which is much more sort of action and kind of shooting kind of oriented, right? But I think the tradition kind of starts with something like this kind of Manic Miner, which is sort of based on these different screens of platforming after a while that that becomes a scrolling scrolling game. So I said with the Commodore 64 design, you can make a game that scrolls around the world, right? And so this is a 1983 Son of Blagger, which to me, it's interesting because it definitely predates a lot of what people what people later think of in say, kind of Metroidvania or Metroid or Castlevania and so on. So there's a very large tradition of these action adventure games or action adventure platform games. in the early 1980s,
in the Commodore 64, way before, like something like Nintendo did anything like that this, right? It's also interesting to know that people just didn't really understand what this was at the time. So the manual for Blagger it actually has this kind of explanation in the inlet, on the cassette, saying that this is a typical image area of view at any one time. So explaining to people that you're only seeing a small subset of the screen, because people weren't really used to that. And so why is that special? Well, it's actually if you look at it and realize, like, a way you can think of like early computer history like this, so there's all these kind of precursors, like mainfame computers and typewriters and early boards and like the Commodore up here and the Atari 2600. There relatively few, the computers actually allowed for hardware scrolling. So again, people were worried about the ___ of games.
So say when the IBM PC was developed, it didn't actually allow for kind of hardware scrolling. So remember, so at least it was it wasn't until the early 90s that the PCs actually had like scrolling scrolling games properly. And so the Commodore 64 along with the Atari 8-bit at this time was basically the only kind of computer that allowed you to scroll around the screen. And I think that created a whole specific tradition. You also had, of course, games in this in this kind of area, I think a famous game is kind of Impossible Mission, which is famous for this ___, "Destroy Him, My Robot" a sample when the game starts It's also kind of weirdly modern, it.
It's actually a rogue like, so the levels are randomized. It's also unbelievably hard. And I think this was really common at the time that basically a lot of Commodore 64 games were probably practically not something you could complete as a kind of human.
And so what magazines often did, especially in Europe, was that they provided these kind of pages of cheats. And so cheats at this time was not some kind of code that had been designed. It was actually got a piece of program ming. So you would you'd have to type in as a specifically a poke command which you can modify the machine code of the game. So if there's a plane screen, you got three lives, you can change the number from three to 200 lives, or something like this, right? And so magazines, especially in Europe, were kind of very closely part of this thing that on the one hand, games would often be too hard.
On the other hand, magazines would help with kind of providing modifications to the program, so they would actually be playable. So I think it's a little difficult to hear audio wise for now I'm just saying saying that So Monty on the Run is also another game in this arcade platformer tradition. It has this really famous music by Rob Hubbard.
And I think this is also it was a very central thing in the Commodore 64, the fact that you had this video, sorry, the sound chip, which is very close to some sort of like leading analog synthesizers at the time. So you compared this really wonderful music, and there was really this whole slew of famous composers, like this case, like Bob Po or K Hug thing or other people like that. And this also meant that music has a special status, right? So this is from SA 64 in the magazine. There's there's a real chart where people who write in where the famous game is for the time being, but it's also a music chart separate from the games So people would actually also write for the currentlyly famous using on the com4. And that would also be, say, people would rip the music from the games and you at the plotby discs, the pirate with collections of music. So there was a kind of pre sort of NP3 tradition of kind of training and swapping music prior to kind of modernate music piracy.
I think also the legacy, of course, as what we've probably got to talk about, is also as the first platform for a graph graphical online mult user experience by Rainy Farmer and she Morningstar as something that was tied in this case, to quantum links, which was a dialogue service, and some called Commodore was also early in kind of selling modents, allowing people to connect their computers to not the internet, but to other computers, right? And so to come with with a 64 Legacy in games, I think there's a few different things to point to, right? So Simp City was making designed on thever 64 by Will Wright specifically to use the scrollrolling facilities of the machine, The Sis was inspired a little computer keyble, and one of the developers in Granted O terms about having the an inspired by an early 64 game called Siren City., which was also a chunkdown game about crime And the action adventure game was very strong tradition on the Com 64. The open world game being like Elite or Pirates by Sid Meyer, and games like, say, fromhab of the online graphical multiplayer games. So I think often this is kind of forgotten, but I think that the machine actually couple of since before, I think, hasn a very clear imprint on gaming history.
So Kamara. US was hesitant to promote games, right? But but European distributors actually kind of got into it during the second half of the 1980s. So this is, I think it's second 1987 Swedshad which where these kind of delinquent youth youth seem to be saying, saying, where have you been out? What have you done nothing? So clearly, they're up to no good, right? And so the idea is that the Com 64 and playing games in the Commer 64 is the better alternative. At least it keeps the kids out the streets They would also be packaged computer deals by commer 64 with a Batman package, for example. And so that became the end of the game computer became much more prevalent in Europe in US.
So this takes to this this third line, right? that people also started making this kind of funny, interesting, and computer subculture, which originally, I think, grew out of people in the same grew out of kind of cracking or breaking coveration, but it would often then involve making these demos And demos were pieces of program that would usually kind of illustrate as some kind of trick that was thought to be impossible. So, by example, I'm talking about that the combo 64 has this blue central screen and then in this light, blue border. So people realized that around the mid 1980s, and you could actually get around it. You can trick the medion to forgetting to draw this blue border.
And so here's the top and the bottom border is gone, but you'd rather do like this and then make show sp in these kind of borders in the side border as well, which is a little more. tricky. So why was that important? It's just because every time you turn the camera 60 from one, you're faced with the same same kind of screen, the same kind of layout, the same kind of border. And so if you've seen this a million times, suddenly seen graphics outside that, is kind of really shocking. And you also, it also became this kind of thing where there was a kind of fish for showing as many sprides as possible. So this is one which shows kind of 32 sprides at the same time.
And well, this is like shows a bit like when the computer is doing the work to show these friends So the demo scene became this kind of competition for finding new kind of weird tricks on the Como 64. And so one of the things Yeah, so Yeah, so one of the things that happened was that there was this whole subculture around it. So this is from a demo party in 1989 at the opera and Trilogy in Dominator's Party. And you can see there are several hundred young people, mostly young men, just just in the 18s or early 20s, meetinging up, to program and to a demo competition. So this was in way, bro, kind of subversive and kind of very well organized And this is actually me, and so as you can see, this nothing has changed since then. And so what you do is that you submit a demo to the party and then show it it to other people.
And then there was a voting system. So this is the demo. I've been working on and this is like the winning demo, which kind of for every screen explains why the screen is important.
So this is the 32 sp multiplying compl and business, et cetera, right? So that there's often these explanations for why this is technically interesting. And this other demo one, and we were only third, I'm still slightly bitter, but I accept the votes. I think it makes sense, right? But it's interesting to me that this was such a central thing thing, right, that there was a large subculture run around this kind of weird kind of weird, at least kind of very technical computing, but also computing for his own sake and computinging with your friends and just kind of competing with your peers. It doesn't then interesting to look at the current the databases we have these things. We can see that of all countries, Germany was the one that seemed to be in the origin of most kind of crack software And you have a few other countries that stand out the US in Sweden, and Denmark. And in terms of the number of demos produced, you can see that Germany again is the biggest country.
The U.S. was not a very big demo producing a country as far as we know We can see also compared to the size of the country than actually Denmark and Netherlands and Sweden are are the ones where they kind of most demo activities activity. This takes us to the fourth life and keeping up with the future. So after a while, then the computer started to grow old, right? So there was there's a feeling that there were newer machines, typically it's in PC, or especially the Comodo Amiga, and to kind of keep making the Como 64 keep up, then there's all this work in doing things like graphical interfaces, like Gos, is this reviewers and talked about, finally, as a largeington, like icons and windows and pull down menus, all the things you didn't actually have on the commer 64 and so the commer 64 will be made to sort of heap up with newer computers.
We could also see that, so when a popular game like the Nega game Linux and the L came out, in 1991, there was all this kind of anticipation about will, that would be a proper Kam 64 version of it. And so people understood that this was not something that would actually live up to the immediate version, but people were hoping that it would be a surprisingly good as the review in this case said. Instead of this time, there were like many things kind of going on. People were still still making demos.
Things like this, I should also show show you I'm just sure there's another thing but there's a famous one calleduori. And so gradually a keyboard then sort of trying to make demos, which were a bit more based on a kind of experience, not so much based as explicitly on a technical trick, but a bit more based on trying to make a kind of coherent kind of narrative or coherent experience with coherent music and a graphical style, or a theme that kind of goes all the way through And so this is an example level of of a demo, which clear does all kinds of things that you wouldn't expect in common or 64 to do. And so for example, you can get something like this, this kind of a very large gratical object object, whether you have spids, which are attorney, which is obviously not something that the Como 64 has any facilities to do So something, when you get to something like this, there's always kind of ongoing person, like how exactly it was this name, because this is not the kind of thing you expect the common 64 to be listen to. Also, you don't expect the common 64 to be able to do this kind of double layered scrolling line because it doesn't really have two layers of that kind. And so that's kind of an an ongoing thing that kind of was happening, right? People try to do new new tricks, right? This takes us to the fifth life where we are now, and where the limitations of become the 64 are now charming, right? So now it's actually an interesting historical device. And the fact that it has big pixels that it only has age friets, it only has a specific analog synth, is actually something people find fascinating now.
that this is actually something we want to celebrateate find. And suddenly, what, for a moment felt like a limited device is actually now a very charming, and wonderful kind of device. There's this kind of small switch, I think, which often happens with kind of old technology. And then you can also see like a game like Lem's, which people had tried to make in the best possible version of the Com 64, Now that's section we make, which makes it in these kind of very chunky original characters instead. So now that we have gone beyond being able to make these kind of really amazing amazingly good versions of modern software, now as a confascination with making an even more simpler, even more simple, even more chunkier and original so there was.
And there's also an arts like Rayul Mayers who does kind of workshops and and art performances on a corner of '64, and she likes to work work with these kind of very chunky characters as well. And that's also a fascination, so now that the Comin can be emulated, however you want, that's also fascinated thatination with the physical device itself. So left in Creo, a Swedish developer and tinker, he makes musical instruments. For example, this is a commodoriian which which actually features two fully working Commodore 64s he's playing different parts of promanding accordion, and then the bellows in the middle actually being made out of old fluggists, right.
Then we can also see it at the army at this kind of point of resurgence, so there are these various charts where key will vote for their famous theory games and demos. And right now, actually, the most popular demos, the most people most popular demos are from 23 and 24, like this year in Atlanta last year, and the most popular games are actually from 2022, 2020, and 2018. So there definitely is a sense that has the best years to become a6400 in the past, they might actually be happening now as people will become even better at using the machine. And so that's the five lines of the come 64, like the idea that in a way, the reason that it could could last so long was that people thought about it in many different ways. It was a serious computer, it was an ar game or a game machine It was a machine for this kind of subverse and computer culture, it was as a machine that was barely keeping up in the future. And now we're in this internal Comod 64 style period where it's an interesting histoorical style, a machine that has certainly limitations, but those limitations are actually charming now.
And so that brings us back to the original question, given that the machine didn't change, it was't, how could it be so many things to so many different people for so long? First, I think that the machine was designed, as I said, with many different intentions in line mind, but it was designed to be a weird control system. It was designed to be a synthesizer, it was designed to be a game machine And all the fact that it had all of those kind of intentions inside actually made it possible for people to use it in all kinds of different ways, right? It was also very flexible, right, so that it was up to the user to decide to not crash the the machine. So you could use every single part of the machine in off label in ways, and nobody would stop you.
And that allows, the demoine to exist, to create all kinds of new tricks that were not obviously possible from the beginning. And it also said that the machine had some various kind of fllaws, like the flbing drive was really slow, but then later you got all these kinds cartridages when she spinx it. So the flaw is in the machine, because it was so popular, and she created this kind of market for addons. I should also say that I think this demonstration is that you could keep doing things for the one me platform also shows in a way that we now are perhaps in a pretty strange place where we kind of expect our phones to to only last three years. So the fact that you can have an old device that can even be introduced for 12 years unchange and still be used 40 years later and shows us us that it's possible to kind of keep finding new things to do with a machine a machine that you may not actually need to be stuck in this loop of plant of solicens as we are now today, right? But I also think that what it teaches us is that we can keep finding new things to do with the device, right? And I think what the CO 64 basically told us is that a computer can be fun and you can have many different lives. Thank you.
Thank you so much. That was awesome. Indeed.
We we rejoin here to
2025-04-04 22:20
