Too Much Fun finally tells the C64’s legacy

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.

“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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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:

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:

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:

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.

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:

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-202² 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:

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:

How did the VP react? I asked.