Book Review: Too Much Fun – The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer

push to talk #50 // the forgotten history of early 80s home computer games + a bizarre anecdote involving nintendo, commodore, and (allegedly) the mob

From Too Much Fun by Jesper Juul, with permission from the author.

There is a mystery at the heart of Too Much Fun, the new book about the history of the Commodore 64 by the Danish academic and game designer Jesper Juul:

Why is the C64—by far the best-selling home computer of the 80s—so often forgotten in video game histories?

Some might ask this question as an idle complaint. Why do no C64 games ever show up on “Best games of all time” lists? But in his book, Jesper Juul takes the question more seriously by embracing the academic tradition of media archaeology to dig through the history of video games and prove that—no, actually, historians and writers are bizarrely blind to the impact that the C64 had on games.

In example after example, Juul shares examples of books that gloss over the C64 to rush forward with a shortened history of games. It begins with a concise, clean pre-history—pinball machines leading to arcade machines leading to Magnavox and Atari—which all came crashing down in 1983. Then, the story goes, Nintendo revived the industry with the NES and began the games console era.

The problem with this version of games history, Juul argues, is that it overemphasizes the “games crash” and erases important connecting links in the chain.

The C64 is often remembered as a primarily EU phenomenon today, and it’s true it was bigger in the UK and European continent. However, as late as 1986 the C64 represented over 31% of the home computer market in the US.

“As a researcher or journalist, it is always easier to repeat a well-known story when you want to set the background,” Juul told me in an email. “In the US, that became the story of ‘the crash’ in 1983, which was almost US-only, and also ignored the home computer scene in North America. Remember that Electronic Arts and Activision were making Commodore 64 games during the 1980s!”

Despite this, early video games history has often been reduced to a shorthand: “The crash, and then came Nintendo,” Juul says. “That’s just life for you.”

But dig into the reality of the C64, and what you’ll find is an astonishing library of games, enjoyed by the over 12 million owners of the C64.

Because of how rampant piracy was on the C64, it’s not feasible to determine from sales charts alone what games were most popular among C64 owners. However, Juul offers us a workaround, thanks to the UK magazine ZZap!64 which surveyed its readers monthly about their top five games.

From Too Much Fun by Jesper Juul, with permission from the author. Note the music charts as well—today there are popular YouTube playlists collecting C64 game tunes.

By digging through the Zzap!64 archives, Juul was able to reconstruct a sort of Billboard Hot 100 style chart showing games that spent the most months on Zzap!64’s GAMES TOP 30 chart.

From Too Much Fun by Jesper Juul, with permission from the author.

Many of the expected classics are here (Gauntlet, Bubble Bobble, Bionic Commando, Ghouls ‘N’ Ghosts, Golden Axe, Smash TV), but there are conspicuously missing ones as well. SimCity originally appeared on the C64, after all, but is absent from the chart. And where’s its predecessor, Raid on Bungeling Bay, the first game Will Wright ever published?

The answer to this is in part explained by the surprising revelation that the C64 had the most published games of any platform prior to MS-DOS in the 90s. Over 5,000 games were released on the C64 over the course of its 12-year lifespan, a phenomenon that Juul has again painstakingly quantified in his book:

From Too Much Fun by Jesper Juul, with permission from the author.

Juul reports having played hundreds of C64 games in his reporting for the book, so I asked him for his recommendations for anyone new to the platform:

PUSH TO TALK: If you had to pick 5 truly "must play" or "iconic" games from C64 library, what would they be?

JESPER JUUL: Very hard question! I would say:

1. Boulder Dash, a wonderful early physics-based puzzle game, "positively Newtonian" according to a review.

2. Paradroid, a prolonged "take over the other robots" game, of unclear genre, as was often the case.

3. Impossible Mission, a rogue-like (!) platformer with the famous "another visitor" sample.

4. Last Ninja, an advanced action-adventure.

5. Turrican, a later scrolling platform/shooter with a great soundtrack.

I can also recommend trying some of the truly weird games like Hover Bovver (mowing the lawn), Bozo's Night Out (getting drunk), or Little Computer People.

Enter the Imaginaries

From the description I’ve given of Too Much Fun thus far, you might get the impression that it’s a simple revisiting of the C64 in the time of its heyday—but it’s actually a much stranger book than that.

The animating idea that structures the book is the concept of imaginaries, an idea taken from media archaeology which basically argues that real technologies are constantly influenced by fictional conceptions of how technology might work.

From Juul’s book:

Wearing a VR headset today, we may imagine ourselves part of a future where we spend most of our time in virtual spaces, but we then often remove the headset after ten minutes. Imaginaries often set up expectations that exceed what a machine can do, but the actual and the imaginary work closely together, and “the transition between imaginary and actual media machines . . . can be almost seamless.”¹

In this book, I take imaginary to mean any imagined concept of a technology’s function, role, or meaning. Imaginaries also shape our interaction with a computer.

I’m very enamored with this idea, and the VR example Juul uses is perfect. So much of the VR/AR industry has been chasing that imaginary vision put forth in Ready Player One for the past decade.

“Imaginaries are obviously extremely present in games,” Juul told me. “You can see this in hardware, like with the Xbox One and the Kinect, which imagined the Xbox to be the home entertainment centerpiece for watching television and switching channels with voice and gestures, perhaps in turn inspired by Minority Report? It made business sense, but nobody seemed to want it, so that imagined future did not come to pass.”

The meat of Too Much Fun takes this idea and runs with it, examining the imaginaries that have influenced the world’s view of the Commodore 64 over its history.

Using the framework of evolving imaginaries impacting the public’s conception of the C64, Juul breaks down the C64’s history into five eras:

1. As an early BASIC computer to be used for mundane family activities and tasks

2. Then as an in-home arcade machine

3. Then as a tool to be broken apart and hacked

4. Then as an aging, outdated piece of hardware that could nonetheless be pushed to compete with newer machines

5. And finally as “a historical machine, whose quirks and limitations no longer represent cutting-edge technology,” but which nonetheless has “a historical style we can use or emulate at will.”

Each chapter is interesting in its own right, though chapter three, about the ways hackers found ways to do unintended things with the C64, is the most entertaining. Juul’s own involvement in the Danish “demoparty” scene is catalogued, including with some hilarious on-the-scene photography:

Caption from the book: Left: Party organizer Einstein sleeping under a table and under paper printouts. Middle: The author in the blue shirt. Right: Participants at the 1989 demoparty seated in school halls with their computers. (Photos by Jan Lund Thomsen.)

Though Too Much Fun is technical and reverent in parts, Juul is also doing original historical reporting, playing and discussing a bunch of games, and sharing photos of wild Danish hacker parties. And in between all that, he keeps surprising you with original bits of data journalism.

To sum up this “review” in a phrase: I highly recommend Too Much Fun. It’s both a needed corrective to other history books, and a book in a category all its own.

But before I go, there’s one other thing I have to share about it, because I went down a rabbit hole following up on very weird story that Juul mentions in the book.

Nintendo, Commodore, and… the Mob?

One of the more shocking passages in Too Much Fun comes early on in the book, when Juul casually references a number of business deals that almost came to fruition during the Commodore era.

I’ll just quote the book here:

The history of Commodore also includes momentous decision points that could have made history wholly different. In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak tried to sell their Apple II computer to Commodore for “a few hundred thousand dollars” only to be turned down. Commodore also rejected the offer to distribute VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. It seemed logical that Commodore would license Nintendo’s games, given Commodore’s Japanese connections, and given that many early VIC- 20 games had been developed by Japanese HAL Laboratory, including by later Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata. However, in 1982 product manager Michael Tomczyk negotiated such a deal with Nintendo, only to have Tramiel renege on the agreement at the last minute with no explanation. Tomczyk has explained his frustration with Tramiel’s decision, and attributes it to Tramiel not wanting to “insult or offend Bally,” the then-criminal reputation of which Tomczyk confirms, “Some people claim that there were some tough characters running Bally/Midway, and I can verify that.” Nintendo made deals with Atari and Coleco instead. It is easy to second-guess such decisions, of course, but we cannot know how the alternative histories would have played out.
—Jesper Juul, Too Much Fun, page 16 (MIT Press review copy)

I read this and was like… hold on. Did this guy Tomczyk just strongly imply that Commodore backed out of a deal with Nintendo (probably forever changing video game industry history) because Commodore CEO Jack Tramiel was afraid of the mob? This is the kind of thing an entire book could be written about.

For decades, journalists have reported on connections between the Genovese crime family and Bally/Midway (which owned the US distribution rights to Space Invaders and Pac-Man). This would have been known to Tramiel, who had struck a deal with Bally/Midway to distribute their games. So it’s not outrageous to think that Tramiel would have been hesitant to do anything that would earn the ire of Bally/Midway and its backers.

Tramiel—a holocaust survivor who became a business legend—passed away in 2012, but Michael Tomczyk (now age 76) is still active in tech. I reached out to Tomczyk and we connected over the phone.

Tomczyk told me that he was present when the Commodore team originally struck a deal with Bally/Midway. He says that the deal was for licensing rights to all Bally/Midway games except Pac-Man (which was licensed to Atari).

“My role was to present the VIC-20² and show how it would run the games, and then I sat in on the negotiations,” Tomczyk says. He describes what followed as a very quick meeting. “In fact, there was never a contract. It was a letter agreement. Jack told me as we walked out of the meeting, ‘That’s the fastest, biggest business deal I’ve ever done.’”

Tomczyk says that the lack of a formal contract wasn’t considered to be an issue. “Some people say that Bally/Midway was linked to organized crime in some way, but I have no comment on that,” he says. “But the people there were… they didn’t worry about contracts. They knew they could enforce it.”

Shortly after, Tomczyk says he tried to negotiate a similar deal with Nintendo. His story, as he told it to me:

"What happened is, I negotiated this deal to buy Donkey Kong and all the Nintendo games and put them on Commodore computers. I cleared it with Jack in advance, and I actually did the contract. I invited the Nintendo VP [NOTE: unfortunately, he doesn’t recall the name of the VP] to come to Commodore in California to sign the contract.

"He came, he reviewed the contract, and he signed the contract. I then took it into Jack’s office to sign, and Jack looked at me with a straight face and said ‘I’m sorry Michael, I changed my mind.’ I said ‘excuse me?’ and he said ‘I changed my mind. I don’t want to do the deal with Nintendo.’"

Tomczyk says he believes that Tramiel backed out of the deal because he didn’t want to insult Bally. Jack was definitely not afraid of the mob, he says. “He was absolutely fearless. Bally was the first arcade game company to license games to Commodore and it would have been bad form to do a deal with their competitor (Nintendo). That was the basis of Jack's decision.”

But at the time, the decision was tough to accept:

“I said ‘You know how much face I’m gonna lose in Japan? I negotiated this in good faith and he’s sitting in the next room!’ Jack said ‘I’m sorry, you’re gonna have to go tell him the deal is off.’ So I had to go back with my tail between my legs to the Nintendo Vice President and tell him that Jack had decided to back out of the deal.”

How did the VP react? I asked.

“I told him what had happened and I apologized. He was very cool. He’s Japanese! He was cool, calm, collected, and very mature about it. He accepted it. We didn’t talk very much after, and he left.”

The Nintendo Famicom launched a year later. Its CPU was a modified version of the same MOS Technology 6502 chip used in Commodore’s VIC-20.

Sometimes history seems predetermined. And sometimes you can see where it forked.

Article update, Dec 13th: Added an additional quote from Michael Tomczyk to clarify his perspective on Jack’s reasoning for backing out of the Nintendo deal. (Thanks Michael!)

That’s it for this week. I just got an email from a Las Vegas-based pinball machine operator and the guy says he has a deal for me that’s too good to refuse.

I’ll see you next Friday.

1. Here Juul is quoting Eric Kluitenberg’s book “On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media.”

2. The VIC-20 was the predecessor machine to the Commodore 64, and a forgotten icon of video game history in its own right. It was the first home computer to sell over a million units worldwide. Michael Tomczyk, quoted above in this story, led marketing for it.