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http://www.cc65.org/ Free compiler for 65xx CPU targets
http://vice-emu.sourceforge.net/ Multi-platform emulation of all Commodore 8bit computers

Libraries and repositories
  http://www.gb64.com/index.php
  http://www.lemon64.com/

Death Race got there first.

And Speed Racer (no relation to the guy who drove the Mach 5) for the C64 followed. It had several different ways of keeping score, including Horns and Halos. You got a Halo for every pedestrian you passed without harming, and a Horn for every pedestrian turned into a red splat on the street (with an appropriate approximation of a wet "splat" sound). As I recall, possible victims include a businessman, a child, a dog, and an old woman with a walker.

But it wasn't popular, so no one cared.

Look here: http://www.gb64.com/game.php?id=8747&d=18

Some of my fondest memories of growing up were playing video games with my dad on our Commodore 64. I remember one game, Falcon Patrol, where you fly a blue Harrier and shoot down red enemy jets (probably Soviets). I could always fly and shoot the bad guys, but I never could land the plane. I would always wait until I was almost out of fuel and ammo and then try to quickly hand the joystick off to my dad for him to land it for me.

Another game he and I used to play was Threshold, and he actually got so good playing it with me that he crashed the game because he got so many extra lives.

It was because of playing video games with my dad that he taught me how to do the basics of loading programs and games on a Commodore 64. While, that doesn't seem like a big deal, but at 4 years old, I thought it was pretty cool that I could list the files on a disk, find the game I wanted, and load it all by myself.

There WAS a game of "fahrenheit 451"! This article is wrong for suggesting that it never existed.

It was a text with graphics adventure game on the Commodore 64.

http://www.gb64.com/game.php?id=2650&d=18&h=0

There is a Commodore 64 version of that game in BASIC. LOOK HERE

The Great Escape for the C64, a mostly monochromatic (except for the little border around the tiny game screen) simulation of escape from a German concentration camp. During the day, you had to go through the routine of a prisoner or risk being put in solitary. Solitary involved looking at your character in a locked room until the guards let you out. If you didn't touch the joystick for 5 mins, the game took over for you.

I never had the patience to collect all the items and info needed for escape; I think my character just died from boredom.

There was one political game I remember playing on the Commodore 64 called Tyrant. But there were other ones called "Dictator 64" and "Banana republic" as well

Anyway, in Tyrant you played the dicatator of an impoverished third world country, which is slowly falling to pieces and going into higher debt and inflation. You had to survive as long as you could before the next cout de etat. The game was *just* about impossible to win. You would try and stave off the coutry's problems as long as you could, but eventually you would bankrupt the country and get ousted.

Finally, I played the game enough to find out a secret on how to actually MAKE money and become a really wealthy country. I don't think the authors intended anyone to be able to do this, but anyway.... the methods needed to do this in the game were, well,... shocking to say the least.

What you had to do first was to get a huge army and smash all the surrounding countries with an iron fist. Then slowly convert your army into a huge secret police force. Then convert from Communism to a Democracy and hold elections. Then tax the population of everything they have (100% taxation) until the population was really angry. At election times, you spend a fortune brainwashing the populace to vote for you... and somehow that worked to get you relected again. To counter unemployment and deal with population growth, you send everyone into the secret police force. Crime is not an issue because you've effectively got a big brother police state.

Somehow the game mechanics let you amass money every year doing that, and you could stay in power indefinitely. So you end up with a police state which conquers all the other countries with a powerful army, taxes its citizens through the nose and takes all its property, pretends it's a democracy and then brainwashes its citizens during election times.

It shocked me because it sounded almost too close to home.

A long time ago (1986 I think), Activision published a game called Portal, and C64, PC, Amiga, Mac, etc. It is an interactive novel where an intelligent computer pieces together the story of why nobody is left on the Earth. The pieces come as memos, effectively e-mails, and you can browse other parts of the system for various bits of information on characters, events, etc. It's very absorbing and is obviously predates this "new" thing by nearly 20 years!

There are other excellent games from around the same time like The Fourth Protocol which, although much more interactive, effectively work in the same manner via an icon-based system. A brilliant game, by the way, highly recommended.

Awful.
Oh, bollocks. I spent hours playing that. It was one of the first "realistic" flight sims (as real as you can get on a C64). Sure it wasn't great, but to a ten year old with an interest in flying, it rocked. One of the first C64 games I ever owned. On tape, yet.
Other people liked it too.

Not only is the C64 the best selling model of microcomputer ever, but it is also the most well understood machine (i.e. the most hacked), and probably has the most games for any one platform. Just check out Gamebase64 and you'll notice that there's well over 15,000 titles that were made for the machine.

In the meantime, I'm checking out SPLAM which the author better hurry up and release for GBA!

As we're adding links to slashdotters cabs - if you like, take a gander at my Pac-Cab. It's what was left of a jamma cabinet, but with none of the fancy extended control panels so it looks like it would have done in a real arcade. Runs MAME, Gamebase64, WinUAE, Visual Pinball, and so on.