Thanks to the wonders of Aldi stores’ increasingly strange bargains, Matthew Hall of KlickTock has just saved a bundle of his early games for the Commodore 64 from impending demise.
Popping into Aldi for some supplies there amongst the groceries was Aldi’s latest oddity to compete with the occasional wetsuit or boat winch – a Portable Cassette Converter offering simple plug and play capture of old cassettes. Armed with this new piece of technology Hall spent a marathon weekend liberating his childhood game design portfolio for the Commodore 64 which had previously been condemned to a slow death in a shoe box.
Programmed mostly when he was at primary school, the bundle features such lost treasures as “Nonsense Manor”, the machine coded “One Man Squash”, and a series of SEUCK games programmed in Sensible Software’s 1987 “Shoot’Em-Up Construction Kit” for the Commodore 64.
You can find them all here to enjoy.
Matt explains:
These games were developed between 1984 and 1988 (thereabouts) for the Commodore 64. Exact dates for each game are unknown, but I’ve tried to put these into a rough chronological order… as best as I can remember.
Ghostbusters
Jackpot
Lightraycer
Ladder Invaders 2 (experimenting with changing character graphics)
Space Journey (lots of text adventures during this period)
Shopping Day
Nonsense Manor
Out of this World
Setup
Ship (I actually sent this in to Melbourne House to publish… they said no!)
One Man Squash (my first attempt at machine code)
Aliens (my SEUCK period)
Operation: Aliens (lost)
Operation: Tigerforce
1944
Took me around 12 hours to pull these from 30 year old cassette tapes using a Cassette->USB device I purchased from Aldi. Software extracted using Audacity, CCS64, WAV-PRG and C64List.
A number of titles are still missing or damaged. Including Operation: Aliens, Jumpy and a West Bank clone I made.
Apologies for any breaches of copyright. I was only 9 years old!
Matt
@klicktock
2013