The Commodore 64 at 40: back to the future of video games

The bestselling computer made home gaming accessible for millions as it launched the industry toward the mainstream with classic titles such as Dropzone and The Sentinel

For a period between the winter of 1983 and the summer of 1986, my life was completely dominated by the Commodore 64. The seminal home computer, launched 40 years ago this month, featured an 8-bit microprocessor, a huge 64k of memory and a set of graphics and sound chips that were designed by the engineers at Commodore's MOS Technology subsidiary to power state-of-the-art arcade games. That didn't happen. Instead, Commodore president Jack Tramiel ordered the team to build a home computer designed to smash the Atari XL and Apple II. So that's what they did.

I didn't know any of this when my dad brought home a C64 one afternoon a year after the launch of the machine. Ours came with a Dixons cassette featuring a number of little demo programs and a copy of Crazy Kong, a version of Nintendo's Donkey Kong, written entirely in Basic, and fairly mediocre. I played it to death anyway. That Christmas, I asked for some actual good games, which would include the legendary multi-stage shooter, Beach Head, the inventive platformer, Lode Runner and the footie game International Soccer, one of the few titles to come on a cartridge rather than a cassette tape.