Commodore 64

Commodore 64/128
𝅘𝅥𝅮 "I adore my 64; my Commodore six-ty-four"

What it was

The Commodore VIC-20 was the first affordable home computer for many American kids, but it was a piece of crap (even at the time), so the first real home computer for many was the upgraded Commodore 64 (or C=64 for short). It had a whopping 65,536 bytes of RAM, and came with a BASIC interpreter. You had one-byte-at-a-time access to all of the RAM (with 'peek' and 'poke' commands in BASIC) so you could hack the software to your heart's content, or write in pure machine code. The latter feature was exploited by magazines that would publish pages full of numbers you could type in to create nifty games -- this was downloading via NEWSPRINT and EYEBALLS and FINGERS, people. Used audio tapes (ick, no) or 5.25" floppy disks (170 kilobytes!) for loading & saving data. Thanks to 'peek','poke' and a lack of any RAM protection by the OS, software piracy exploded as kids swapped floppies during every recess. This lead to the trend of copy protection schemes where the game would stop halfway and ask you to solve a puzzle with the help of a chart in the manual, or assembling puzzle bits that were in the box.

If you can't be arsed to get a C=64 emulator, you can buy old Commodore 64 games (with an emulator wrapper) on the Nintendo Wii shopping channel.

Little known facts

The C=64 was still being manufactured until April 1994.
The audio chip in the C=64 was the famous SID 6581, which became a staple of electronic music for decades.
The 1541 disk drive was actually a microcomputer in itself, with it's own operating system. Hackers were later able use up to 16 of them in series for cluster computing (fuck your Beowulf clusters, we got disk drive clusters!)
The game system is the worst thing ever you can't even play most games on it avoid at all costs. Stick to your regular C64.

The List

For a definition of the Genres, see A List and Guide to Game Genres.

This article is a stub. You can help /v/'s Recommended Games Wiki by expanding it.

Title	Genre	Description
Archon: The Light and the Dark	Strategy + Action	Looks like chess, but the pieces don't capture each other, they switch to a PvP arena and fight to the death. Every piece has different health and attack abilities, which wax and wane as the board cycles between light and dark. Winning is either destroying the other side, or controlling five nodes on the board. The sequels sucked, but this game was ported to every platform, even the iPhone. Play it now! Gameplay video on YouTube
Armalyte	Shoot 'em Up
Bruce Lee	Action	Action platformer where you're the famous shirtless fighter exploring, collecting lanterns to unlock your way into the sinsiter fortress, attacked by endless ninjas and green sumo wrestlers. A second player could join in at any time to take over the big green guy. A very faithful remake was made for modern Windows machines. Play it now Gameplay video on Vimeo
Creatures	Puzzle Platformer	I really gotta say, this is one amazing game. Not only is the game well animated, good looking, home to a stellar soundtrack, and incredibly inappropriate and violent but downright fun. You have to figure out ways to save your fellow creatures as quickly as possible or they will be brutally murdered in the most gory of ways. Also on Atari ST and Amiga but this is the best version.
Creatures 2: Torture Trouble	Puzzle Platformer
DJ Puff's Volcantic Capers	Platformer
Elite	Simulation + Space Trading	Not just the first 8-bit game to use 3D rendering with occlusion, it was one of the earliest sandbox games as you were free to do missions, or not, or just explore the 2048 unique worlds (with their own names, commodity prices, cultural quirks, and it's NOT RANDOM, in less than 170 kb!) and make money being a bounty hunter or buying low and selling high, upgrading your ship if the local spaceport has the parts. Released in 1984, even the eight-bit version is still considered a high-water mark in the genre it birthed. Watch on YouTube Oolite is a modern remake with OpenGL
Enforcer: Fullmetal Megablaster	Shoot 'em Up
Great Giana Sisters	Platformer	Biggest rip off of Super Mario Bros ever, yet clones it quite well and worth a play. The soundtrack might have the record for 'most re-mixed chiptune ever.'
Last Ninja	Adventure	Isometric action? layered scenery? on my commodore? more likely than you think. Watch it on YouTube
Last Ninja 2	Adventure	Urban setting, solid plot with chapters, all-around upgrade. This is the one that was ported to Amiga and NES. Watch it on YouTube
Maniac Mansion	Adventure	This is the great-great-grandpa of the pointy-clicky adventure games like Secret of Monkey Island, and Sam & Max. The codebase was later used for the seminal graphical MMO 'Habitat', the crown jewel of the Commodore 64 -only online network 'QuantumLink,' which eventually changed their name to 'America OnLine'. It's sequel, 'Day of the Tentacle' is more widely known. The original codebase, and generations of improvement, are available for free as S.C.U.M.M.VM (SCUMM = Script Creation Utility for Manaic Mansion)
Mayhem in Monsterland	Platformer	One of the very best of the entire C64 library, truly wonderful in all around. The graphics are stunning, the music is catchy, the game has wonderful controls and well standard platform action.
M.U.L.E.	Simulation	Four players compete at developing a sci-fi frontier, with both hot-seat and shared-keyboard action. Balance resource harvesting, consumption, and selling your surplus at the market to other players with a unique action-auction method. It's so good, it's been turned into a multiplayer online game. Gameplay video on YouTube The theme music was an Easter Egg in Spore
Project Firestart	Survivor Horror	Say hello to the grand-daddy of the also-EA-published-Dead Space. Terrific atmosphere that plays strongly on isolation and claustrophobia, also differs itself from other early survivor horrors by branching into multiple paths and endings. After over 2 decades, this shit still has enough caliber to scare the fuck out of you.
Rodland	Platformer	Best version.
Sword of Fargoal	Rougelike	Primative roguelike, but it was the most popular for the C64, probably because it was so easy to copy around. It's been remade for the iPhone and iPad.
Ultima IV: The Quest of the Avatar	RPG	The three previous games were straight-up tile-based RPGs, but this is where Richard 'Lord British' Garrot's reuptation started. It's another tile-based RPG, with a world so large (256x256) you had to load it from disk in chunks, and tactical combat sub-screens. But this game was different in that your goal was not to grind, level up and beat the final boss, but to prove you're a good guy by acting Honest, Compassionate, Valourous, and five other virtues that measured you with every combat and social interaction. This is 20 years before "Mass Effect" was published. The sequel Ultima V added NPCs that had their own schedules for daily routines. Many RPG firsts were seen in the Ultima series. Gameplay video on YouTube