Most of gaming history from the early 1980s are all centralised to one country: Japan.
Mario, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Galaxian and Space Invaders were all developed there and exported to the rest
of the world.
Since the granddaddy of Japanese gaming, Nintendos first home console: The Nintendo Entertainment System
(NES),
was not widely released nor popular in Europe AND since the Commodore 64 itself wasn't popular in Japan; these
two factors combined make it as if there are alternative unconnected reality that exists in gaming history.
These realities would all get consolidated together in the early 1990s when the Super Nintendo and the Sega
Megadrive would rise
to global domination.
The Commodore 64 sadly wouldn't survive this fight, it's parent company went bankrupt and it slowly faded from memory.
But before all that......
In August of 1982 the Commodore 64 launched and took the world by storm.
The Commodore 64 has the distinction of the "highest selling single computer model"
with sales estimated to be between 12 and 17 million
An amazing middle ground between the ludicriously expensive full personal computers
of the time, and cartridge home consoles like the Atari 2600
One of its main selling points, and part of it's namesake was the 64 Kilobytes of RAM it contained.
This was incredibly powerful compared to it's contemporaries of the day, but considering that a modern
phone, the iPhone Pro 13 has 6 million kilobytes of RAM, even something that was lauded in it's day is
94 thousand times LESS powerful than devices we now carry around in our pockets.
Another of its primary points of appeal was its price. It retailed in America at $595, which might seem like
a lot, but one of its closest competitors was the original IBM PC, which retailed at $1,565! The IBM PC it
should also be noted only had 16KB of RAM!
Doing a conversion to euro for those prices feels little inaccurate, since we're discussing events from so
long ago, the euro currency did not exist at the time, but assuming it did with the same exchange rate as
2022, it would be €560 for the Commodore and €1491 for the IBM PC.
If you think those prices are ridiculous, with inflation taken into account, in modern money the Commodore
would retail for $1840/€1730 and the IBM PC for $4830/€4544
The Commodore 64 allowed users to play a variety of games via magnetic cassette tape, as well as write code
and program their own games in the BASIC language.
Commando - Run and gun with famous music
Ghosts and Goblins - Brutally difficult platformer
Bubble Bobble - Excellent port of the arcade classic
Flimbos Quest - Platformer with beautiful parallax scrolling
The Last Ninja - Isometric Ninja Adventure game
Artris - Tetris clone, but with better music
The Great Giana Sisters - Super Mario Brothers clone
All copies of The Great Giana Sisters were removed from sale and never saw a rerelease. It is believed this was to placate Nintendo, who threatened to take the creators to court!