This is a collection of articles written by C64 users about their C64 experiences:
Richard Mace - 7th November 2000
"The C64 - Loading Games"
It is difficult to convey to anybody who never owned a Commodore
C64 exactly what the C64 experience was like. The fact that games took anything from 2
mins to 15 mins to load, so you started the game loading and got into a routine of making
a cup of tea or getting a snack whilst it was doing it. Some games producers attempted to
fill this loading void with a pretty loading screen and / or loading music. The last ninja
series are particularly good examples of this breed of game in that you almost felt guilty
making your "loading cup of tea" whilst such masterpieces were loading. An
excellent idea came from Mastertronic (a top quality bugdet software house) in the form of
"invad-a-load" in that you played space invaders whilst the game was loading.
The younger gamers will not appreciate loading problems with their quick, reliable
disk/CD-ROM/DVD/cartidge loading mechanisms, with loading times of a few seconds. Many a
happy hour was spent bent over a C64 datasette (tape player / recorder that came as
standard with the C64) with electrical screwdriver in hand adjusting the position of the
playback head with engineering precision. Advanced users noted the angle that the screw
had to be rotated in order to get their favorite games to work, to minimise the
"setting up time". The pleasure that comes with successfully getting a game to
load from a bad tape was intense. Thus when you actually got to play the game, it actually
meant more to you because of all the pain you had to go through. Needless to say, some
games weren't worth the effort in the end.
So why was the C64 such a success I hear you say. Why did we bother? Well the competition
(Spectrum 48, Dragon 32 - remember that?, etc) all had similar loading problems, but the
C64, with its unbeatable speed, graphics, sound and larger memory effectively killed of
all competition. The games that came out on the C64 were out of this world in all
departments.
So why should gamers of today bother with the C64 when technologically-better machines
exist today with fast, pretty games that are becoming increasingly life-like? The simple
answer is that C64 games are still games. There are puzzles to solve, enemies to kill,
cars to race, goals to score. The only difference is that you have to use a little
imagination to overcome the limited graphics. A much wider variety of games exist on the
C64 than you will ever find on any game platform than exists today because the games were
reletively cheap to produce and software houses were not afraid of making a game based on
an idea, however strange or quirky.
With the re-creation of the C64 on a PC life is made easy as games are loaded quick, easy
and reliably via hard disk so you can concentrate on playing those classic games. Some
emulator games still include the loading screen and music. If they exist, I ask you to
take your time, absorb the loading screen and imagine what it was like in the days when
you had to watch your game slowly loading.