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To me, the Commodore 64 was a platform surrounded by mystery. I remember walking into my brother's room one random day--probably with the intention of playing some Atari 2600 games--and being stopped in my tracks by the very sight of it. It was sitting over on the room's right side, completing a scene that was conspicuously different from the one I'd observed a day earlier. Specifically, it was resting upon my brother's corner desk, whose surface had for years remained unoccupied.
"Now where did this thing come from?" I wondered as I examined the unfamiliar-looking computer system from up close.
The name "Commodore" appeared on both the monitor and the disk drive, but it didn't ring any bells. I couldn't recall having ever heard of such a product or company. "Strange," I thought.
Though, at the moment, the manufacturer's name was the least of my concerns. What I really desired to know was how this entire situation developed.
"When and how, exactly, did this thing get into James' room?" I questioned, perplexed. "Did I miss a second birthday party at which he received it as a gift? Did dad buy it for him on a day when I wasn't here? And if so, why wasn't I informed about any of it?!"
I had no clue.
Really, this was all part of a continuing theme with James and his electronic toys: Usually they just seemed to appear out of nowhere, and never would he provide any explanation for how, exactly, they came into his possession. This was true of most of his 2600 games, which, as far as I could tell, would just suddenly materialize within his storage box (the "magic box," as I called it); and of many of the NES games that he had somehow sneaked into my collection without me noticing. "What is this?" I'd say upon suddenly coming across an unfamiliar-looking cartridge while I was looking through my game racks. "What the hell is 'Vindicators'?!"
It wasn't long before James came moseying his way up the stairs and into his room and found me standing there. Noticing that I'd taken an interest in his new device, he decided to formally introduce me to it. "This is the Commodore 64," he told me. "It's a gaming computer."
But after switching on the machine, he just kinda stood there silently, as if he were expecting the Commodore 64's boot-up sequence to explain the rest on its own. It didn't. I had no idea what was going on. I mean, this was, after all, the first computer system with which I'd ever interacted. All I could do was stare at the monitor and attempt to process the information that was being displayed on its completely alien (but eventually iconic) blue start-up screen.
"OK--now what?" I asked. "Where's the game?"
"That's not how it works," he responded. "The Commodore 64 isn't itself a game. Rather, it's a device that plays games."
That's when he introduced me to floppy disks and therein explained to me what they were and how to properly insert them into the disk drive. Thereafter, he began to proudly demonstrate for me his new device's gaming capability. In the process, he spent a few minutes explaining to me how to run the games. Particularly, he taught me how to type the famous command line whose every variation would soon be burned into my memory:
Load "[value]",8, 1
To my amazement, the floppy disk that James had previously inserted into the disk drive contained not one but a number of games on it. "Multiple games on a single disk?!" I questioned internally. "What kind of sorcery is this?!"
In such a case, he showed me, you could insert a dollar-sign symbol as the value and thus command the C64 to display a list of all of the included games as well as their associated file names. Though, if you were only interested in playing the first-listed game (usually the collection's best), he noted, then all you had to do was insert an asterisk as the value.
And as all of this was going on, I continued to remain frozen in a state of wonderment. Suddenly, on a day that previously held no great significance, my world had changed, and there I was trying to get some kind of grasp on the strange new reality that was now forming around me.
"What is this machine?" I couldn't help but wonder. "And why have I never heard about it before?"
Before leaving me to my own devices, James told me more about the particulars of floppy disks, a storage medium with which I was largely unfamiliar, and informed me that, actually, you could play C64 games using Atari 2600 controllers! It turned out that the C64's keyboard just happened to feature two 9-pin D-connector ports--the exact same type used by the 2600! They could be seen on the keyboard's right side.
I found this to be mind-blowing. "This is crazy!" I thought. "It's like two entirely disparate worlds crossing over!" (In future pieces, I'll explain in detail why I found such phenomena to be so fascinating.)
The C64 having 2600 controller support was ideal for me because I had no desire to play or even attempt to play games using some complicated-looking keyboard ("There are, like, 50 buttons on that thing!" I calculated.) To me, the idea of controlling games by poking at multiple "buttons" (or "keys," as normal people called them) using multiple fingers was completely absurd; I imagined that it required a level of finger dexterity that was exponentially higher than the one I was currently at. Also, I knew, there was no way I could competently control the action using a mode of input that lacked for tactility. If I wanted to feel as though I had total control over a game, I'd need to be holding something in my hands. But since keyboards were flat-laying and couldn't possibly be held or gripped like a controller, they wouldn't be able to offer that desired feeling of tactility. That's how I felt at the time.
In short: Keyboard control was foreign to me. I saw it as being overly complex in comparison to the simple, intuitive one- or two-button control methods I'd been using all my life. Going from a 2600 controller or an arcade panel to a keyboard was akin to being asked to pilot a four-engine plane when your previous flying experience was limited to operating a remote-controlled helicopter.
So over the next few days, I spent many an hour sampling games from James' inexplicably-already-rich C64 library ("How did he get all these games so quickly?!" I wondered for a few moments before deciding that such a question was probably better left unanswered).
There was something about the C64's games. They had an indescribably curious quality to them. They didn't look or sound anything like other video games--like those I'd played on the 2600 and the ColecoVision and in arcades. No--they were weird. But not in an off-putting way, nay; rather, they were weird in a highly intriguing way! I was mesmerized by their wonderfully distinct emanations--by their every sound and visual. They had the power to alter the environment around me--to make me feel as though I were now operating from within some type of alternate reality.
I felt the same way about the C64, itself. I was fascinated by it. I'd never seen anything else like it ("A video-game system that comes in separate parts?!). I'd never heard of a machine that ran games in this fashion.
And, indeed, there were no games like those to which it gave life.
The C64 and its games worked together to transport me into a world that was unlike any other I'd ever visited. It was one that I perceived as being endlessly, wondrously bizarre and unrestrained in comparison to those I'd been frequenting since I was 4 years old--to those I'd visit whenever I was playing games on the 2600 or on one of my friends' consoles. It had no clear boundaries. It had no obvious rules. Interacting with the C64 and its games was like being dropped into uncharted territory and becoming lost in an unfathomably vast forest that appeared to be devoid of safe spaces. Really, I was kinda overwhelmed by it.
That's the main reason why I didn't explore too deeply in those first few days. Instead, I sought temporary shelter. I determined that my best option was to ease myself in--start the acclimation process by identifying and gravitating toward known, comfortable-sounding properties. That's how I found games like The Goonies, Kung-Fu Master and Friday the 13th. "I've heard these names before," I said.
Though, my first stop on this safe route turned out to be a very impactful one. It landed me at the doorway of Bruce Lee, whose title character was instantly recognizable to me.
It was the game's only music track, it turned out, but one that did a fine job of demonstrating for me the C64's strikingly unique, seriously-impressive audio capabilities. The C64 produced music that had a highly-synthesized quality to it; this made for music that sounded markedly different from the type generated by consoles' and arcade machines' audio components. Also, it made for music that was simply higher-grade. In comparison to other platforms', the C64's music was more complex-sounding, more resonant, and more immersing.
Here we had, again, another curiously disparate aspect of the system--another aspect that so fascinated me. "How is it that this system's music is able to so effectively alter both my emotional state and the atmosphere of my surrounding environment?" I wondered while listening to C64 music.
That was exactly what I was thinking as Bruce Lee's title-screen theme played.
When the action commenced, I was instantly drawn in by the game's arcade-style action, which invited me to engage in one of my favorite type of gaming activities: collecting all of a screen's items before moving on the next one! While in reality a bit more complicated than that, Bruce Lee's objective was still easily understandable: The goal was to maneuver about room-sets and in the process find ways to grab each respective room's hanging lanterns; in some instances, procuring some of a room's lanterns required re-entering it from an intersecting point on an adjacent screen. And you had to collect all of these lanterns, I learned, in order to open up a secret passage on the middle room's bottom level. The passage granted you access to the next area--to the next room-set--wherein you'd engage in more of the same activity.
Oh, but it wasn't so simple, you see: In most rooms, after a certain amount of time had elapsed, enemies would start teleporting in. Bruce Lee featured two of them: First there was the speedy, annoyingly pursuant ninja, who would appear within six seconds; his job was to relentlessly chase you down and attempt to obstruct your movement and consequently inflict damage with sword-slashes. About ten seconds later, were he assigned to that room, a green-colored sumo (who in the future would earn the honor of being called a "Ginetta) would appear and begin behaving in a similar manner; the difference was that the sumo was slower-moving and attacked with flying jump kicks.
Bruce had two means of dealing with them: a standing punch, which was weak and lacked for range and was thus useless, and the far-more-effective running jump kick, two or three of which could kill either enemy. Thanks to the latter, one enemy, alone, wasn't much of a threat. Though, when both were onscreen at the same time--and they usually were--things could get dicey.
Thankfully, I observed, neither could jump straight upward and grab onto elevated blue nets (which are "vines," I've since learned). If a room was absent of ground-affixed nets, they'd be screwed; once they had traveled down to or had been knocked downed to a room's bottom level, they'd be stuck there forever. This was important to know because it was the key to easier, less-stressful room navigation. If you understood their movement-patterns and how to manipulate them, you'd know how to go about keeping them out of your hair. Well, for the most part.
Now, James didn't own a manual, so I had no idea as to what the game's storyline was; where, exactly, I was supposed to be; or why I was procuring all of these lanterns. In fact, I didn't know what was going in any of these C64 games. That's because James, for some reason, didn't own manuals or even boxes for any of his C64 games (though, they weren't absent for the same reason that all of his 2600 and NES purchases arrived in our home without boxes or manuals. Please don't ask me what that reason is).
While the collector in me would later come to lament this fact, it wasn't such a big deal at the time. I was fine with it because it afforded me the opportunity to once again put my imagination to work and interpret Bruce Lee's world however I wanted. So I imagined that Bruce's mission was to infiltrate a Japanese castle that was gated on all sides--by the tall mountains to the north and the sea to the south--and retrieve his town's stolen lanterns. Soon he'd traverse his way down into the castle's underground areas, which I saw as "temples" with specific climates: The blue ones were cold and dark, and the orange ones, which were located much further down, were blindingly bright and unbearably hot. Later, Bruce would come across a "teleporter room" that would transport him to the different sections of the pirate ship (whose climbable masts represented my favorite visual) that was coasting along the castle's perimeter.
In the early going, though, I had a little trouble adapting to the controls. My biggest issue with them was that you had to push up to jump, which I found to be an inconvenient, counterintuitive method. "God no," I thought. Though, I wasn't picking on Bruce Lee, specifically, no. It was more a general complaint aimed at developers who designed side-scrolling action games this way. I strongly disliked having to push up to jump. For as long as I'd been gaming, I'd never felt comfortable or in full control of games in which you had to push up on a control stick to jump. (It took me years to become fully comfortable with up-to-jump controls.)
The fundamental problem was that many of Bruce Lee's platforming challenges were constructed with diagonal jumping in mind. This gave me trouble because sometimes the 2600 controller's janky joystick wouldn't recognize my diagonal input and would thus become an impediment to my advancement. Let's just say that I'd get real nervous whenever I'd come to a room wherein I had to clear multiple gaps in do-or-die fashion. There were a great many instances where Bruce would just continue running, right off of platforms, and drop directly into spike pits. It was sure to happen at least once in a tense late-game situation.
Though, I rarely got aggravated when the controls failed. It wasn't any kind of hindrance to my enjoyment of the game. I liked Bruce Lee too much to get mad at it.
In contrast, I had a lot more fun when it came to learning about how to manipulate the game's hapless enemies, who, I discovered, could be tricked into killing each other and themselves, thus unwittingly neutralizing their own threat! In any room where there were mines, for instance, you could position yourself adjacently to one of them and therein bait the ninja, who would foolishly run on over, stop right in front you--placing himself directly above the mine--and get blown up before he could finish executing his attack! Otherwise, you could trick them into striking each other and throwing themselves into gaps. When you consider that these two foes were of the endlessly-respawning variety, the manipulation of their movements and the instigating of friendly fire were very useful tactics.
Really, though, they were incompetent enough on their own. They could replicate any of Bruce's actions or movements, yes, but not always proficiently. Hell--a lot of the time, manipulating them wasn't even necessary: While under their own influence, they'd simply run off platforms and trap themselves in pits or brainlessly climb up into ceiling spikes. Also, they were apt to knock each other into pits--particularly those that had deadly objects scrolling across them--the sight of which I always found hilarious. It was as if I were locked in battle with two of the Three Stooges.
Bruce Lee was a short game, yeah (it had only 19 rooms in total), but it certainly wasn't easy to beat. Most people couldn't--not right away, at least. In that respect, its true "length" was more a measure of how long it took you to finally work your way through to the end. It took me, I'd say, about 20 attempts spread out over the course of a week. So, yeah, it was a considerably challenging game. Hell--some of its later rooms contained platforming challenges that were more brutal than any of those I'd ever faced in side-scrolling action games.
If you wanted to conquer Bruce Lee, you had to learn how to correctly time your actions. You had to read the environments and their activity and calculate as to when it was the right moment to jump over a moving obstacle, fall into a gap that contained one or multiple scrolling objects, or begin shifting over while climbing on conveyor-like surface. And you had to such calculus in almost every room. The further you got into the game, the more math you had to do. And it only took one "rough spot"--one hard-to-read obstacle--to do you in and drain your entire life-stock (you had five lives/falls in total).
That's what I needed to do to beat Bruce Lee. I had to spend hours memorizing the deadly objects' movement-patterns and learning how to precisely calculate the length of the intervals that preceded their respawning (I credit Bruce Lee as the game that helped me to acquire and develop these skills). This is what it took for me to negotiate my way over, under and around all of those fast-scrolling electrical currents and spiky flying objects. And, as mentioned, I had to figure out how to do all of this while using a sometimes-uncooperative 2600 controller; getting it properly read diagonal input and do so with consistency was as exhausting a trial as any.
Oh, that damned controller. It cost me so many lives and ruined so many promising runs. Let me tell you, man: There was nothing more annoying than dropping off the side of a platform, right into a spike pit, when your intention was to leap over it. And it was particularly infuriating when it would happen in room 18 and at a time when I had only one life remaining. Over the years, that exact scene played out numerous times. Hell--it was the same story with just about every side-scrolling C64 game I was playing at the time: I'd spend 30 stressful minutes trekking my way into its later stages, proceed to fall in a hole five times in a row because the controller wouldn't cooperate, and then get sent back to title screen.
What a time.
But I managed to persevere, and eventually I made it to the game's end boss. Finally I was close to beating one of the toughest games I'd ever played.
Now, if I knew anything about end bosses, it was that they represented games' biggest threats. If you were to defeat one of their ilk, you would have to put forth your most exertive effort yet. You'd have to exhibit both the highest level of skill and considerable focus. That's what I was prepared to do.
But, well, it turned out that Bruce Lee's developers didn't care to adhere to convention. Rather, they thought to make their game's end boss a complete joke. To defeat it, all you had to was run straight across its chamber--without pausing for even a moment, lest you'd be fried by one of its spewed projectiles--and push a switch that functioned to electrify it and thus reduce it to ashes. That was it. That was the game's anticlimactic, stupidly simple end-boss battle.
Though, I guess it does make sense that the encounter lacks for any type of complex interaction. I mean, the programmer, Ronald J. Fortier, was working with such a simple, rudimentary game engine--one that probably wouldn't have allowed for the creation of an epic-feeling, intricately scripted boss fight. What we got was the best he could squeeze from it.
Don't get me wrong: I was happy to have beaten Bruce Lee, absolutely, but still I was equal parts puzzled. I had many questions, like "What the hell was that purple thing directly above me?" and "Why did it install a mechanism that was designed to kill the very being that installed it? Who would do that?"
The weird thing is that, in all those years, I never got a good look at the boss, since my inclination was to always focus all of my attention on Bruce. This actually worked to lend the "purple thing" a certain mystique; I came to perceive it as something akin to one of those movie monsters that would appear and disappear in flash--one of those that would swiftly carry out its evil deed and then split before anyone could positively identify it. I liked to imagine that the point of my travails was to catch only the briefest of glimpses of a sasquatch-type creature that knew that it was about to be spotted and thus had to vanish in a hurry.
What any of that has to do with a purple-colored demon clearly being electrocuted to death, I, uh ... don't know.
Hey--look over here! Pretty screenshots!
Also, I never quite understood what it was that was happening on the game's ending screen, in which Bruce can be seen continuously jumping for joy within the interior of the most unpleasant-looking, luridly colored room in the history of video games. "Where, exactly, am I supposed to be?" I would always wonder. "And why is this place covered in flames?"
From what I could tell, I had either saved the world or set it completely on fire. I wasn't quite sure how burning the place to the ground could be perceived as a "victory," but "Whatever," I thought.
It's a fine line, I guess.
Over time, Bruce Lee became one of my favorite Commodore 64 games. I returned to it regularly. And before long, I committed to memory its every pixel and grew to be quite a Bruce Lee master.
Now, Bruce Lee wasn't my absolute favorite C64 game, no, but it got just as much play as those that ranked above it. I'd be sure to load it up whenever I was engaged in one of those hours-long C64-gaming sessions wherein I'd play a mix of games. And no matter what the mix was, Bruce Lee was certain to be one of the games included in it. It was, in that regard, the equivalent to games like Trojan and Renegade--NES favorites that could be counted upon to provide me some reliably fun action after games like Dragon Power, Adventure Island and Ghostbusters had finished absolutely destroying my spirit.
It turned out, also, that Bruce Lee was a pretty fun multiplayer game. That's what I learned when I was able to rope my friends into playing it with me. What brought us the most joy was not its standard alternating-control two-player mode, no, but instead its surprisingly entertaining "Opponent" mode, which allowed for the second player to take control of the green sumo. It was obviously intended to be a competitive mode in which the second player is tasked with obstructing Bruce and ultimately killing him, but we decided to make something more of it. Once we noticed that there was nothing restricting us from doing so, we chose to instead play it cooperatively! I'd play as Bruce, and one of my friends (usually Dominick or Mike) would take control of the sumo. And while I'd run about collecting lanterns, my friend would work to make life easier for me by focusing his attention on that poor, poor ninja and continuously interrupting his movement and generally abusing him. Sometimes I'd feel bad for the little fellow.
But we always had a blast playing Bruce Lee in that manner. We made the game our sandbox--a place wherein we could have fun in any way we desired. We saw ourselves as sheriff and deputy working together to keep our town free from evil. And we had a lot of fun in doing it.
The fun continued for several years. I continued to play Bruce Lee until the day the Commodore 64 disappeared from my brother's room--the day when he sold it (and no doubt used the money to buy another product in which he quickly lost interest). That was sometime in the early-mid-90s, approximately ten years after it first appeared on that corner desk. In that decade-long span, the C64 and its games brought me a near-endless amount of great memories. They continued to provide me transport into a wondrous, seemingly boundless world--one that I loved to visit and observe. And they provided me some of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I'd ever had. Truly I'll forever long for that era.
I'm writing this piece now, twenty years later, because it's taken me that long to find a way to adequately express how I feel about the Commodore 64 and games like Bruce Lee. For years, I didn't think that I could do it--that I would ever be able to find words and terms that could do well enough to sufficiently translate and thus give solid form to my thoughts and mental images. But here we are.
My younger self, more so, struggled to put thoughts to words, which is why he settled on those like weird and weird-feeling to describe the C64's disparate features and how they made him feel. But, still, he knew what his mind was telling him. He knew that the C64's games were aesthetically and aurally distant and consequently had their own markedly distinct flavor to them. He understood that an arcade game was not an NES game was not a Commodore 64 game--that each came from a different world; that each had an indescribably unique vibe to it. Really, he didn't need words to fully comprehend the meaning of those differences. He didn't need to make a blog post and write about them. He already knew, as I do now, that to explore the C64's library is to visit a mystical woodland whose every pathway leads to a treasure trove of strange and wonderful things.
It was one of those pathways that led me to Bruce Lee, a true hidden gem. And it's a gem that I'll forever cherish. It'll always be with me. It'll always be there to remind me of my earliest experiences with the Commodore 64 and of all of those days I spent blissfully lost in its wilderness.
I still have all of James' C64 games, actually. They remain in his specially designed game-case, of which I made sure to take possession before he had the chance to sell it, too. Sadly, though, without an actual C64 to play them on, the games are just paddles without a boat. I'll always regret that I failed to become aware of his plan to sell the C64; had I known he was going to do it, I would have tried to talk him out of it. Or maybe I could have bought it from him.
Oh, what might have been.
All I can say is thank goodness for C64 emulators. They're an absolute godsend. They've allowed for me to revisit Bruce Lee and my other C64 favorites (a lot of which are rare or obscure) and do so in a convenient fashion. If only the console manufacturers would get in on that action.
I was thrilled when Nintendo did just that and added a "Commodore 64" category to its Virtual Console, though I was disappointed with the result. Not much became of the addition (and, honestly, I was naive to think that anything would). The selection of games was very limited, and they all disappeared on August of 2013, when the entire platform was removed from the service (most likely due to licensing issues). I was hoping that the C64 would find second life on the Wii, but alas--that just wasn't in the cards. It makes me sad that such an amazingly vast library of creative, wonderfully strange games will probably wind up being lost to time and completely forgotten; and I'm disappointed in the game companies and game-creators that seemingly have little interesting in keeping their work alive.
To them I say, "Dig into those libraries, fellas! There's gold there, I tell you!"
But I won't give up on the dream. Oh, no--I'll continue to hold out hope that Commodore 64 games will one day reappear on the Virtual Console or that, instead, some other company whose employees are passionate about the industry's history will develop a digitally based download service that will make available every C64 game that can be mined. And hopefully it will include Bruce Lee, to which I can then have easy access.
The doubters say, "File not found." But I say, "Ready? Run!"
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