Before the Xbox 360 vs the PS3, before the PlayStation vs the Saturn, before the SNES vs the Megadrive, there was the Commodore 64 vs the Spectrum. Here in Australia it was barely a competition, but I remember fist fights kicking off in the playground over this debate. Now, thanks to Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, the arguments are over!
When I was four years old, my father took me out to a local electronics store and said we were buying a computer. OK, I thought, not really knowing why that was such a big deal. Twenty-seven years later, I now know it was one of the most significant days of my life.
Jack Tramiel, a Holocaust survivor and the tech visionary who founded the company that created the legendary Commodore 64 computer, died on Sunday at the age of 83, Forbes reports. We’ll have more on Tramiel’s great legacy later.
I was never a Commodore 64 guy, I had a Spectrum, but I have a massive soft spot for the Commodore Amiga, which is the computer I upgraded to after the Speccy. So this little Amiga branded release from Commodore sort of tickles my nostalgia bone, but at the same time disappoints me.
This isn’t something done for internet shits and giggles. It’s an “official conversion” of awesome death simulator Canabalt running on… the Commodore 64, one that will soon be going on sale. Like, it’ll come on a cartridge. Amazing.
We live in an age of gaming gorgeousness. Gamers’ lives nowadays are filled with fancy normal mapping and illumination engines, powered by slickly encased hardware that outputs onto super-sharp screens. In short, there’s a lot of thought given to aesthetics in the present day. But, it hasn’t always been this way and an upcoming art show will showcase the uglier — yet vitally important — gaming hardware of yesteryear.
Think games based on movies, action-oriented TV shows and classic works of literature are a bad idea? They’ve got nothing on games based on soap operas.
Back in the UK, when I was a youngster, before SNES vs MegaDrive playground battles we had Spectrum vs Commodore. I was a Spectrum kid, but even this has me clutching my nostalgia bone – a new Commodore computer, complete with the old Commodore 64 casing, that functions as a modern computer, but runs C64 games through an emulator. It’s… it’s beautiful.