Commodore 64: a visual compendium

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Commodore 64: a visual compendium, celebrates one the most popular home computers of all time. It takes you on a journey through the C64’s varied and colourful gaming library. Starting in 1982 with early releases like Jupiter Lander and Beach Head, we travel forward through the decades. 

The 1980s saw an array of amazing titles such as Dropzone, Impossible Mission, Elite, Mercenary, Uridium, The Last Ninja… the C64 played host to an incredible array of genres, from shoot ’em ups to puzzlers, racing games to arcade adventures to games that still defy categorisation (The Sentinel, anyone?).

By the time the 1990s rolled around, talented coders were making the machine do things the original hardware designers didn’t think were possible: games like Turrican, Creatures and Lemmings showed that there was life left in the old CPU yet.

And even when Commodore went bust and the computer was no longer being manufactured, the games still kept coming. So the book pays homage to the developers that kept the system alive, featuring games that were completed and released a decade after the last boxed C64 left the high street.

Commodore 64: a visual compendium features well over 100 titles, represented by beautiful in-game shots or loading screens, plus a gallery of artwork by legendary ZZAP!64 artist Oliver Frey. Also included are a series of features, including profiles of key Britsoft developers, interviews with famous C64 artists, a look back at the demo scene, plus a showcase of unreleased titles and the new games being released more than 20 years after the last machine rolled off Commodore’s production line.