C64 Nostalgia

There's a lot of different sayings about how everything was better in the old days, and they're pretty much bullshit. Let's face it. The 80's didn't have a lot going for it. The movies were crap, the music you won't hear anywhere anymore, the TV-shows hadn't yet reached the golden age and I guess even the comic world had some dip there? But they had Commodore 64...

If I look back at my gamer days (oh; I've pretty much retired from gaming these days), I've probably spent more time on the Championship Manager series and its follow-up Football Manager series, than on everything else combined. It's still the C64-games I remember most fondly with nostalgia, even if that's not because of its football manager games...

I did play quite a lot of The Boss (Youtubed above), Football Manager and a couple of other titles, but those weren't the ones I'm talking about as my nostalgia.

Yesterday I read a news-article about a remake of Spy vs Spy coming soon (probably at iPhones and iPads), and it got me surfing Youtube and memory lane equally as Spy vs Spy is one of those fond memories. Tripping over videos like this one about 20 defining C64 games..

...just kept me searching back for more. Of course the games these days have great graphic, multiplayer options and so on and so forth, but there's really no substitute for these old classics. I've played games at my newer PC's, at Nintendo's first 8-bit, Playstation and X-box, but there's still more games from the C64 days I remember fondly than all those newer ones combined. Then again there's something to be said about having experiences at a certain stage of life. Here's 50 C64 games in 5 minutes...

..and a lot of those I've played obsessively back in the day. And I remember the duels with friends and neighbors with classics like Winter Games, Summer Games (I&II), World Games, California Games and Hyper Sports, crushing joysticks with Decathlon or concentrating on your own against games like Aztec Challenger and Tapper. These days you play war against players all over the world, but back then we at least had the Rambo's. His own game First Blood and a lot like it with Commando, Who Dares Win, Green Beret and similar ones. And those martial art's match-ups following International Karate. It was simpler times, but we didn't care about the graphic pixels and the simple road ahead. It was about gameplay, heart, soul and a lot of creative platforms. And then the best of all...

The soundtracks of C64 games changed the world, and it's still enough to almost make an old man cry to listen to these and others. We had to load games, but many of the load-screens were epic. And some of them had the soundtracks to make eager anticipation run through you. I honestly feel like searching for my old C64 (as emulators aren't my thing), because I could so easily do with some time playing Ghostbusters, River Raid, The Last Ninja, Boulder Dash, Action Biker or one of the hundreds of games I enjoyed back when real life simulation in games was a pipe dream. I throw in another classic assembling video for good measures. This one with 28 games and original audio, and some overlapping the 20 defining ones..

Press play on tape...