Weekly Homework Assignment

It's time again for Mama Kat's weekly homework assignment - click here to find out more. I chose the prompt "I remember when ..."

I remember when the Commodore 64 was the coolest "gaming" system around. I remember when it would take 5-10 minutes to load a game on the Commodore 64 ... and we didn't even complain about it. Now, we get pissed when we have to wait 30 seconds to load a game on one of the next-gen systems! We'd normally either eat a sandwich for lunch, or possibly even have a catch with the football out front while we waited for the game to load.

Most of the time, the game loaded, but there were some games, like Bruce Lee or Dr. J. vs. Larry Bird One on One ... basically, 10 minutes of loading was wasted ... sure we'd get pissed, but we'd try to reload the game.

The best thing about the Commodore 64 was the whole "pirate hacking" culture. Basically, there was some sort of "network" of hackers, who hacked a bunch of games, and created copy disks - I was lucky enough to be plugged into this network, and was able to "acquire" quite a few copy disks - as well as a ton of games ... so many, in fact, that I was never able to play all of them ... a wonderful problem to have! One of the funny nuances I remember was buying a bunch of floppy disks, and using a hole puncher to make them "double-sided," which meant we could copy games onto both sides of the disk.

In fact, my friend BT did a podcast about the Commodore 64, and I made a "special" guest appearance - check it out here (episode 9).