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[–][deleted] 150 points151 points  (92 children)

Thanks, I needed a laugh.


[–]ChosenAnotherLife 73 points74 points  (38 children)

I distinctly remember loading "Mail Order Monsters" (great game for the time) off the Datasette. Good times.

[–]Kraekus 59 points60 points  (33 children)

Mail Order Monsters needs a modern remake. So does Archon.

River Raid on Datasette took hours. HOUURRRSSS.

[–]ChosenAnotherLife 29 points30 points  (14 children)

River Raid! Another great game. You're right, a modern Archon would be so awesome. I imagine you could have a lot more depth with a Mail Order Monsters game these days too. That might even make a solid mobile app.

Edit: I just realized a lot of games from that era were a blast. Racing Destruction Set, Hard Hat Mack, Seven Cities of Gold, Wasteland, etc.

[–]MrBallistik 31 points32 points  (7 children)


[–]BacardiandCoke 6 points7 points  (3 children)

I'm first founder!!

[–]MrBallistik 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Fine. But I call blue. And I'm using a Packer. And I'm going heavy on energy.

[–]BacardiandCoke 2 points3 points  (1 child)

LOL. Remember missing a spot on the river because you clicked at the wrong time? Damn food!

[–]MrBallistik 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We've all suffered that indignity. Along with losing a mule because you didn't have it hovering over the icon on the plot.

[–]remember_morick_yori 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Comfy game, unfortunately though it also gave rise to the abomination that is EA.

Funnily enough, just like EA, the entire point of the game is aggressive acquisition of business assets

[–]MrBallistik 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Sad" part? Mail Order Monsters, Archon, and Racing Destruction Set were all EA games. And to this day when I think EA I think of the old C64 load screen with the flashing colors.

[–]Nash_Rambler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh wow. M.U.L.E. What a great, strange game.

[–]Epochelyptikal 2 points3 points  (1 child)

This is the first time I've seen Hard Hat Mack mentioned. Ever. My favorite game in '85 on the old Apple IIc. Thanks for the memories.

[–]ChosenAnotherLife 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Super underrated game! I bet it would still hold up today. That game was challenging.

[–]BacardiandCoke 1 point2 points  (0 children)

All great games! Was just thinking about Archon the other day.

[–]nazispaceinvader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

datestones of ryn for the wyn


Ballblazer, Uridium, Beach Head

[–]Kraftrad 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Fun fact: River Raid was "indexed" (comparable to an NC-rating and thus virtually unsellable) by the German "Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Minors" from 1984 to 2002 (re-ratings are only on request). The verdict was: "Teenagers are meant to empathize with the role of a ruthless fighter and destroyer.[…]. This is a para-military boot camp at child-age […]. With older teenagers playing leads to […] physical tension, anger, aggressiveness, restless thoughts [...] and headaches."


I was a River Raid addict. I bragged to my youngest daughter about getting high score, and she beat me lying on the couch with her head hanging off of it, looking at the screen upside down. It took me about a year before I finally smoked her. Once.

[–]iamreeterskeeter 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I did that at age 6. I got a really high score on River Raid. My dad stayed up past midnight for 6 months trying to beat my score. Never did.


I think my daughter was about 8 at the time. She's 45 now, and we're still super competitive with each other.

[–]AkaiS950 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I had the awesome Texas Instruments TI-99 4/a with the cassette deck data tapes- you had to have the volume of the deck set to a certain level to transfer the game into the computers memory, usually 4.5-5. I was into the Adventure series games at the time that you typed commands in to move around and pick up objects and such. The rich kids I knew had the Commodore 64's and Macs. My neighbor had a Commodore Vic 20 though

[–]Kraekus 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I had my C-64 on layaway at K-Mart for two years. I mowed lawns, dug 125 post holes, worked for my grand father at his garbage collection business, and recycled aluminum cans. A year later I bought the Datasette unit, and a year after that I bought the 1541 disk drive and 10 disks.

I was the opposite of "the rich kids", but I was determined to get that system because my best friend's dad had one, and my best friend was a programming genius at 14. I thought I would be too. Didn't happen.

[–]The_Real_dubbedbass 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I thought Archon had been remade. But maybe wishful thinking.

[–]2wheels30 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It was remade at least once in the 90s on PC. It didn't have the same feel as sitting down on the old Atari 800XL though.

[–]Mesicks 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Anybody remember cohens towers? I never got the stupid thing to work.

[–]Treczoks 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And "Castles of Doctor Creep"

[–]til_n00n 0 points1 point  (0 children)

river raid was censored/put on the index in 1984 in germany.

[–]FirstChurchOfBrutus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What was the TRS-80 version of the datassette called? Cuz that’s why we had, and Zaxxon was fantastic to play.

Well, until it inevitably crashed, then had to be reloaded from the cassette tape. Took roughly as long as that time you had to use a pencil to wind your magnetic tape back inside the cassette.

[–]bombadil1564 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Escape From Epsilon

Twas on the Atari 800XL, though I think it was for the Commodore as well.

[–]twnki 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Gravgun ftw!


Holy shiiit that was my game. And the last ninja.

[–]preusedsoapa -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Well i'll have you know i distinctly remember swimming in my dad's nut sack (Pretty fun for the time). Good times.

[–]feerlessfritz 106 points107 points  (25 children)

load "*",8,1

[–]kalitarios 57 points58 points  (9 children)

snips notch on opposite side

Free double-sided disk!

Also, that 8" floppy though


I was support back then for a grain elevator and I had one of the lady's at one of our elevators tell me her updates had quit working. This was on the new, fancy AT. I drive out to this small town in Iowa, and find 4-5 floppy's jammed in the disk drive. She had never pulled out the first one's I sent her for system updates. User instructions became very, very well explained after that, kind of like Brian Regan talking about the instructions on a box of Pop Tarts.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)


    [–]FoodandWhining 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    Some guys exaggerate about the size of their floppy.

    [–]vibribbon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    Or the moment you realize it wasn't smart to clip the B side of Bards Tale thinking you'd be able to use that for your save game.

    [–]Treczoks 3 points4 points  (1 child)

    It was 5 1/4, not 8.

    I once had to deal with an 8" disk by error - I was asked if we could read "IBM floppy disks", and I said yes, assuming they meant 5 1/4 on a PC. No, they meant IBM minicomputer disks in 8". My vision of importing the data instead of typing them went down the drain in my mind, but my boss had connections that were able to copy the files to 5 1/4 and FAT format.

    [–]bignotion 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    Used a hole punch!

    [–]Sun-Mar-27 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    The 1541 used 5.25 inch floppies. 8 inch floppies were phased out in the early 80s. I've only seen one in my life, it was being used with an Apple II in one of my high school's english teacher's rooms.

    [–]OyVeyzMeir 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    8" disks were the "business" / "big computer" size. IBM, DEC, and other mainframes and minis used that size. Home computers and PCs used 5.25 and later 3.5".

    [–]cuteintern 14 points15 points  (1 child)

    FASTLOAD cartridge in the port on the back!

    [–]esjaydee 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    You know it. Blowing out the insert end of the cartridge before plugging it in. I think I still might have one somewhere. I still have my 64 and a couple of 1541s as well.

    [–]mycall 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    if I had a dollar for everytime I typed this.

    [–]zombie_dbaseIV 4 points5 points  (0 children)

    Holy crap, I haven’t seen that sequence in forever. You just shot something off in my brain.

    [–]esjaydee 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    My GOD. You just lit up by brain like a Christmas Tree. The memories. Wow. Thank you for this.

    [–]bonzaiboz 1 point2 points  (2 children)

    Ohhhh I could type this so fast! I had a commodore 128.. I had some amazing games..! It meant something like this.. Load = Load "*" = general first executable , 8 = device path, like the disk drive , 1 = I don't remember.

    [–]The_Real_dubbedbass 4 points5 points  (0 children)

    I thought the 1 was fir Joystick port but it's been hella long since I've played.

    In addition to the other great games listed here I'd also like to thriw out that they made awesome games of both the Ghostbusters and the Goonies. We had the 128.

    Technically we had the C64 for a week before my dad came home from a business trip and found out my mom bought us a computer. He was mad at her, not for buying an expensive computer for a five year old and a three year old, but because she didn't buy the BEST computer. He tried to like the C64 for about a week, and then one day we came home from school and it was gone. And I was heartbroken. But then around 7pm my dad comes home with boxes of stuff. A C-128, floppy drives, a monitor, joysticks, games, a dot matrix printer, books on programming basic. It was wild. Needless to say I wasn't heartbroken at all and while I have a soft place in my heart for the 64 my bro and I got acclimated to the 128 REALLY quick.

    [–]pinkphloid 1 point2 points  (0 children)


    [–]atsinged 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    OR LOAD "*",9,1 or 10, or 11 if you had soldered over the appropriate jumpers. I learned to install switches, usually crudely drilled in to the top plastics of the drive that let you select 8-11 so you could daisy chain them.

    $10 bucks a pop to add them to your drive, the switches were about a buck at Radio Shack.

    I was 11 so I never had a prayer of turning out anything other than a geek. I can however still solder like a beast though. It's the whole "seeing the connector" bit that has gotten harder.

    [–]kazador 1 point2 points  (1 child)

    I could write that line before I cold write anything else. I still read it as " L, O, A, D"

    [–]farronuff 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    As a kid I always read it out in my head and L O A D 'shift242' ,8,1

    [–]The_Biercheese 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Load “$”,8

    [–]comma888comma111 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    ... RUN

    [–]scsiballs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Make sure your fastload cartridge is plugged in too....

    [–]pigferret 41 points42 points  (11 children)

    DAE remember copying tapes on a twin-deck boombox, and fucking around over and over to get just the right volume and whatever to get a copied game to work?

    Torrents, please.


    I remember making my own phreaking device, recording the sound a nickle made when it was dropped into the coin slot of a pay phone. It made a beep, 2 beeps was a dime, and 3 beeps was a quarter. Our's was pretty rough, just a like cassette deck that had the 1 beep recorded on a tape over and over. Free long distance. Back when a call from Iowa to your granny in Ohio would have cost you 20 bucks for 5 minutes at home.

    [–]HuntBoston1508 2 points3 points  (7 children)

    I've never heard of that but it's fantastic you lived through it

    [–]MightyTribble 4 points5 points  (6 children)

    It really was not, but thanks for the sympathy. :)

    [–]atsinged 1 point2 points  (5 children)

    OH man what a PITA...

    If your friend had a GOOD boom box, it would work every time.

    No one could afford a really good boom box.

    [–]Invideeus 3 points4 points  (4 children)

    And if you could batteries would run you poor anyways. I remember my skateboarding days. The times we had a boombox at the park with enough battery to hear over your wheels was a fucking luxury.

    [–]atsinged 1 point2 points  (3 children)

    Oh hell yah, 8 D cells would get you about 4 hours of music and a boom box that weighed 15lbs.

    [–]Invideeus 1 point2 points  (2 children)

    Oh yea. Always stuck the new kids with the boombox backpack when we skate to other parks or cool townskate spots. Cuz fuck carrying that mofo myself.

    [–]atsinged 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    I think we had parallel childhoods.

    [–]Invideeus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    It wasnt too hard to back in those days. Damn do i miss them though.


    Or when that wasn’t available just holding the single tape recorder up to the record player speaker. Sound was shit but at least you hard to work for it!

    [–]Doyle_Johnson 6 points7 points  (5 children)

    Man, I wish I had been alive back then so I could understand these jokes and also CMD

    [–]Mamafritas 14 points15 points  (2 children)

    The typical command on the Commodore 64 is LOAD "*",8,1

    Load tells it to load

    "*" tells it to load the first thing found on the disc, think executable file in Windows.

    8 tells it to look on the disc drive

    1 tells it which disc drive to look on (was possible to run 2 disc drives).

    [–]bonzaiboz 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    Awesome I couldn't remember what the "1" meant!

    [–]Doyle_Johnson 0 points1 point  (0 children)


    [–]AznKilla 1 point2 points  (1 child)

    Load "$",8,1

    [–]farronuff 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    L O A D ~SHIFT~ 2 4 2 , 8 , 1

    [–]twnki 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    The cool kids used fastload and C= + run/stop

    [–]trigonomitron 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    L <shift>o "PROGRAM", 8,1

    [–]justaguyinthebackrow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    You forgot the ,4!

    Edit: After reading the other comments, it may have been ,8. Honestly, I can't remember. I was so sure when i commented, though.

    [–]atreyukun 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    LOAD “PROGRAM”,8,1 if I remember correctly.

    [–]tree5eat 0 points1 point  (0 children)



    I remember ,8,1

    What did these do, anywho?

    [–]tuck7 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    We always did ,8,1