Software by Gregg A Commodore 64 in 2004



How fun is this? I spent a few weeks helping people in a grade six class make a videogame on the Commodore 64.

Here's how it happened. Each participant got two sessions of use of the classic sprite editor Multisprite, during which time they experimented with pixel editing and sprite animation.

We then pooled the artwork everyone came up with to make a rather cool little game, considering it was writen in BASIC.

Here's one of the screens:


The goal here is to fly the bird around, landing in various spots, and pecking the ground. When a worm is found, the bird must fly back to the nest with it. The good old BASIC GOTO loop gives this a challenging feel, as one presses the fire button on the joystick to flap the bird's wings.

Once in a while, instead of getting a worm, the bird would vanish in a puff, and the message "BAN LAND MINES" would appear.

Then its on to a zany cartoon land



where some sort of cat character on a skate board catches falling TVs on the ends of her skateboard. If the TV falls right on the cat you die. The TV's turn into a variety of weirdly ordinary items such as refridgerators and toilets when they are successfully caught.

Look what comes next. Don't you just love the creativity this old 8 bit technology always inspired? Kids + Commodore - distractions = math really IS fun!





Now lets travel back in time a ways. 1987, and two guys who listen to music by a band who's name we're not allowed to say on the air attempt an ambitious port of the arcade laserdisk classic Space Ace to the Commodore 64.


The third guy seen here is Frank, a friend who actually was in the army, and who was instrumental to the success of the night's operation, but who had nothing to do with porting Space Ace to the C64.


Scott did most of the graphics, while I handled the programming. We began by bribing a friend's friend who worked in an arcade to take the Space Ace machine out of service and haul it in back where we recorded a playback of the laser disk onto videotape.


Scott and I eventually finished one out of about 15 carefully planned levels, and it turned out absolutely great. We used a funny little box called "Computereyes", which was a video digitizer for the Commodore 64, to digitize this frame from Space Ace, which we captured on Scotts' Parents' at the time fancy new frame store VCR.

The idea was to have a digitized frame from the arcade game introducing each of the levels.

The game we put together was truly amazing, in that it actually WAS Space Ace! On a lowly Commodore 64! One could master Space Ace in the arcade, and then play our C64 version, and all the moves and timing needed to beat the arcade game were exactly the same in our version.

I guess Scott and I were deeply offended by the horrible port of Dragon's Lair that had come out previously, which bore no resemblance to the play mechanic of the original. We were determined to show that a laser disk game COULD be ported faithfully to the Commodore 64.


This was accomplished through some clever machine language code I devised, which actually took the form of what would now be called a virtual machine interpreting byte code. As well, it was accomplished through Scott's fantastic multisprite graphics.


The story gets stranger. We shipped our demo to Electronic Arts, who rejected the game, saying that they had never heard of an arcade game called Space Ace. But EOA released their own game called Space Ace within a year of having seen our demo.

Scott and I never did manage to see what the Electronic Arts version of Space Ace actually looked like, and find out if they stole anything from us. Anyone out there with knowledge of the Electronic Arts version of Space Ace: it would be a gas to hear from you.


Scott and I appear in this photo quite a number of years later, reminicing over the glory that might have been.

Software by Gregg