The year was 1983. One day, my dad came home with a big box under his arm. He had bought a Commodore 64—unannounced. It was the very first computer we had ever owned. He intended to use it for bookkeeping and to teach us kids how to use a computer. I think he used it for a few hours before we took over. To us, it was a gaming machine!
Photo: me and my little brother playing Pitstop II
The C64 came equipped with a 1531 C2N Datassette, which took ages to load a game from tape—if it loaded at all and didn’t give a “LOAD ERROR.” We connected it to a small 37cm Philips black-and-white TV screen.
Every few weeks, we would get new cassettes filled with games, all copied versions, of course. I remember the first tape started with Pitstop, followed by Donkey Kong, Jungle Hunt, and Pac-Man.
Ghostbusters
1984 was the year of Ghostbusters! Another kid on our street had the game on a floppy disk. Since we didn’t have a disk drive at the time, he brought his to our house so we could play the game. When he had to go home, we carefully disconnected his disk drive from the Commodore 64, afraid it would crash. Luckily, it didn’t, and we continued playing until it was time to sleep. I still remember the moment we had to power off the Commodore 64, knowing the game was gone. Forever.
Not much later, we got a Commodore 1702 monitor, which was in color. This made everything look so much better than on our little black-and-white TV.
It wasn’t until 1988 that we finally got a 1541-II floppy disk drive. One of the first games we got on disk was, of course, Ghostbusters.