Tom Crossland - The 100 Greatest Commodore 64 Games

The first C64 game I ever played was 1983's Falcon Patrol by Steve Lee. I suspect this game might have come free with the computer. Falcon Patrol is a side on shoot em up. The player plays the pilot of a jet fighter in the Falcon Patrol squadron. Other jets have to be battled and prevented from bombing the airfields. The player has to use the airfields to refuel and also be resupplied with ammunition. The player in Falcon Patrol has three jets - another is given every 3000 points. Falcon Patrol is a very basic side on scrolling shooter. It has fairly spartan graphics, the scrolling is a trifle jittery, and sometimes the missiles go right through planes without exploding. But to me Falcon Patrol was extremely addictive and very atmospheric. It was very special. The sound effects - especially the refuelling sound add greatly to the game. Falcon Patrol was my gateway to an incredible range of games right through the peak golden years of the C64.

The list of games that follows is of course subjective and reflects my own personal tastes. Nonetheless, there is still a remarkably diverse and eclectic range of games in this book. You might disagree with a few inclusions (and exclusions!) but that's all part of the fun of lists. One could easily come up with a list of more than one hundred great C64 games because there were thousands of games produced for this machine and many of them were fantastic. By way of example, I could find no room in this list for games like Thrust, Bangkok Knights, Ballblazer, Fight Night, Exile, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Pole Position. There are simply too many good games on the C64 to include everything.

The C64 did of course have its share of clunkers and terrible games but - happily - we don't have to worry too much about them. This book is about good games. Not just good games but classics of their era. The Commodore 64 was an incredible piece of tech for its time and left a generation with enough happy and nostalgic gaming memories to last a lifetime. Though these games often seem primitive now from a modern vantage point (as we battle our way through the likes of Doom Eternal) this was anything but the case in the 1980s. C64 kids from that decade will never forget pounding those planes with anti-aircraft fire in Beach Head or the digitised cry of anguish in Impossible Mission when you mistimed a jump and fell into what seemed like infinity. Even little games that seemed throwaway and simple like Hunchback II are ingrained in my memories forever.

The C64 was eventually even able to more or less (with a few miss-steps along the way) replicate the arcade experience for home gamers - which might not sound like much today but in the 1980s was a very big deal. To be able to play faithful versions of things like Ghosts n' Goblins and Kung Fu Master in your home was a novelty indeed in the mid eighties. It was like having an arcade machine in your living room. Best of all, once you'd shelled out for the game, you didn't have to put any coins in to play it!

As far as the C64 went, the games to approach with some degree of caution were the licenced games. Companies would get the rights to some popular movie or television show like Knight Rider and inevitably the game they knocked up with said licence would be terrible. That cover art would always lure you in though. Though it's far from the worst game ever made one of my least favourite licenced experiences was Airwolf. A game based on Airwolf! Eighties kids like me couldn't wait to get home and experience some high-tech helicopter action for themselves. What they got instead was a game where Airwolf is trapped in a cave system! Fiddly, frustrating, and nigh on impossible, Airwolf definitely wasn't something I was in a rush to go back to. I remember being dreadfully disappointed too by a game based on Judge Dredd.

Not all the licenced games on the C64 were terrible though. There were some gems hidden amongst them if one was willing to sift through the dross (naturally, Commodore User and ZZAP!64 were invaluable for research before you parted with any of your parents' hard earned money). There are a decent smattering of licenced games in the book which follows. A forgotten classic based on Alien for example and even a fascinating game based on a controversial Liverpudlian pop group.

A common tactic with games companies was to get a celebrity sportsman to endorse their game. So you'd get things like Frank Bruno's Boxing or Alex Higgins World Snooker. These sporting endorsements did not always guarantee a great game but there were definitely some classics. Barry McGuigan's Boxing and Emlyn Hughes Football are two notable examples of the good games in this specific genre. One of the most famous early C64 games was Daley Thompson's Decathlon. Though it didn't make this book I remember the game as being sort of fun but infamous for the dreaded 'joystick waggling' mechanic. To make Daley run faster in the game you had to waggle the joystick from side to side as rapidly as you could. Games like this must have destroyed a fair few joysticks.

Another notorious 'joystick waggler' was Hyper Sports (which is a much better game than Daley Thompson's Decathlon and DOES make it into this book). Years and decades later, I was playing FEAR 2 and encountered a moment in the game where you have to frenziedly stab at the mouse button to have a hand to hand strangling fight with a villain. Talk about Daley Thompson's Decathlon flashbacks! I really hope that mouse mechanic doesn't catch on again.

The golden age of the C64 was the mid 1980s. The machine endured for much longer than that but in the end many people upgraded to the Amiga (which was also fantastic but sadly doomed) or drifted away to other machines. Are C64 games still worth playing today - even if you have all the latest modern releases? My answer to that question is yes! Commodore C64 games are still fun and still worth exploring. Games like Summer Games II, Leader Board and Boulder Dash are still a pleasure to dig out and play.

And there are plenty of other classics too, as we shall see in the book that follows. Shooting games, strategy games, arcade adventures, space flight simulators, sports simulations, racing games, fantasy games, horror games, combat games, boxing games, platform games, and so on. So, without any further delay, let us begin our countdown (in alphabetical order of course) of the one hundred greatest C64 games. Let the nostalgia commence...