When organizing the Role Party I mailed around to some local and not-so-locall press and (as expected) didnt get too much of a reply.. Then came a call from a belgian newspaper called Het Belang Van Limburg and ta-da, the majority of their games page dedicated to our 20-year-old breadbox !

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Here is a translation into english from the article :

The legendary Commodore 64 celebrates its twentieth birthday. The younger gamers will probably laugh when seeing the machine and the screenshots with pixels as large as your first. The older generation (25 and older) on the other hand thinks back nostalgically to this homecomputer. The Commodore 64 was immensly popular. Between 1982 and 1993 over 30 million were sold worldwide. The C64 created the foundation for the game-world of today.

When Commdorore launched the 'C64' in 1982 the computer was an immediate success. About every teenager of the 80's threw his piggy bank to pieces to have one. The Commodore 64 was the first real 'homecomputer', the beginning of an era. The 8 bit computer (0,98 Mhz) had 64Kb of memory (of wich you could use about half), a screen resolution of 320 by 200 pixels with 16 colours and a 3-channel sound chip (the SID-soundchip-. The operating system was called 'Basic', a very userfriendly environment. Mostly the two commands 'LOAD' and 'RUN' would be ebough. Having these extreme mimitations in technical specs did not limit the C64 to create multimedia applications that untill then were thought to be impossible : word processing ('Geos', a Windows predecessor), impressive electronic music and mostly games, inhuge amounts. The largest part of the C64-owners only used the computer as a gameconsole (combined with the tv).

The (much traded) games existed first on cassettes (to be played in the '1530' recorder) and later on flexible floppy-disks ('1541' diskdrive). The first years after the launch the games were simple with just some lines and bobs ('Pac-Man', 'Lady Tut', 'Cops and Robbers', 'Frogger', 'Boulder Dash', etc). With the years the game-designers started to squeeze morge graphical power out of the processor. The list of top games is virtually endless. Some of the great classcs are : 'Winter Games' (1985), 'Commando' (1985), 'Defender Of The Crown' (1986), 'The Last Ninja' (1987), 'Bubble Bobble' (1987), 'Test Drive' (1987), 'Wonderboy' (1987), 'California Games' (1987), 'The Giana Sisters' (1987), 'Barbarian' (1988), 'Skate Or Die' (1988), 'Wizball' (1987), 'Rainbow Island' (1987) and 'The New Zealand Story'. Games that today for many will be old fashioned and have a very low graphic appeal, but years ago they provided at least as much fun as the currect top sellers. Commodore had to call it a day during the 90's, when the company could no longer compete with the oncoming consoles from Sega and Nintendo and especially with the newer PC generations.

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