Games From the Good Old Days

Here are a few of the presentation screens I made for Commodore 64 games I created in the '80s. The poor quality of the graphics is due to a combination of the limited drawing skills I had back then (but compare the first and the last picture and notice how much better I got in just one year) and the mediocre graphical capabilities of the machine.

Velocipede II (the sequel to a game called Velocipede -- don't ask) was one of those horizontally scrolling games where you fired bullets and dodged stuff. Writing a unicycle game was inevitable, because I own one of those things and used to ride around on it a lot back then.

In Fungus you also had the horizontally scrolling theme, but in a 3D environment. No shooting here -- just jumping, running and picking mushrooms. It might not sound too exciting, but this turned out to be my most commercially successful product. The software company even let me draw the cover picture for the box. Then they used it all as a gimmick -- that I had done everything about this game -- to get me interviewed in a computer games magazine.

Clean Up Service was a two-player platform game. A couple of lazy slobs were assigned to clean a hotel in time for the big opening. But there was a lot more to it than that. Some levels contained very unusual gameplay elements. On one of them you had to make hamburgers by leading meat through a grinder, then under a mechanical shoe (to get stomped), into an oven and finally past a chef.