It all started in 1984, when in Finland the prices of home computers were significantly reduced. One could buy a home computer for under 1000 Finnish marks. That’s about 167 euros. My parents bought me a Commodore Vic 20, that costed 999 Finnish marks.

I really liked the first (and at the time only) game I got with Vic 20: Radar Rat Race. See below a picture of the module:

Below is a YouTube video from the game:

I remember that the game had some bug though: When one got far enough, playing the game became somehow impossible.

Another game I liked, was Fire Galaxy. Below is a little video from the game:

A bit later my Commodore 64 times began.

At those days I saw many C64 games. The most remarkable games from me at the time were Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar and Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny. Ah, the story of the games and all the philosophy in them… Especially the three principles (of the eight virtues): Love, Truth and Courage. These define the good in the games. Evil is defined as ”principles” of the opposite of the mentioned: hate, falsehood and cowardice.

As to choosing the character in these games, I always  answered the philosophical questions as myself, not by trying to get my character certain quality. As a result of this, my character became to be of the weakest profession in the game: The shepherd.

Intro from C64’s Ultima IV:

Intro from Ultima V (C64/C128):

When running the game on the C64, there isn’t background music, the sound effects only, because the game is so huge, that C64 hasn’t enough memory for the music.

Boulder Dash and Boulder Dash II were my favourites too.

Below is a video from both games:

I played a lot also Delta, a game by a Finnish programmer Stavros Fasoulas (music by famous Rob Hubbard), see the video below:

One good game for the C64 that teaches also some strategy is Paradroid. There are many remakes of this classic game also to PC.

Commodore 64’s Tetris has incredible music!

There are many games in the world of Commodore 64 that I wasn’t really interested in, but the music is incredible. As an example I must mention Cybernoid II:

Some games were simple and fun to play with good graphics and music, but let the player down with one thing: There was no ending of anykind! I remember playing ”endlessly” both International Karate and IK+ with black belt, but the games just went on and on…

As an youngster I decided, that if I was ever to program a computer game, it would always have an ending.

One incredible C64 game I remember, is Wizball:

Some C64 games I liked, were kind of games that often other people didn’t like. As an example let me mention Armourdillo:

the music of Armourdillo:

If my memory serves my right, I played Armourdillo with music.

Another game, that I almost forget as an example of a game that other people often didn’t seem to like was Master of Lamps:

For the third example of game that the other people didn’t seem to like, but was fun to me as a kid is Poster Paster:

As to Defender of the Crown, I liked C64’s version more than Amiga’s, altough the Amiga version has better graphics and music.

One very good game I almost forgot to the C64 is Thrust:

With Spy vs. Spy II we both, I and one of my friends had lots of fun. We made lots of traps to each other in order to get to that submarine and win the game. There might be one “room” filled with so many traps while we were playing the game, that in practice there was only one special way to get through the room.

One special game from the year 1984: Ghostbusters. Why this game was special? At the time I was Vic 20 user and to me (and to many others) it was simply amazing to hear so authentic speech from a movie in a computer game! What a miracle computer C64 was: With it one can even listen little parts of authentic speech from a movie in a game. How we were amazed!

A game that made many of us laugh, when we were kids, is Super Pipeline II. A fun quality game with nice music and funny graphics and not too hard to finish.

One funny detail from the past in the 80s in our C64 times was C64’s Commando; first the other boys told how hard game Commando is. Eventually one of my friends tried to play Commando for the first time in his life (and this was the first time he saw the game too) and this one friend managed to finish the game from the very beginning to the end at his first try — how the other boys were confused. “Yeah, really hard game!”, he said with little sarcasm.

A game that required fast thinking and good reflexes and gave us visually something new compared to what we had seen before was Cosmic Causeway:

For the end let be mentioned some early gems in the world of Commodore 64 games: M.U.L.E., Archon and Archon II.

Videos below:

Perhaps I come back later with my Amiga gaming history…