My C64 years were cassette years. From around 1983 to late 1987 that little breadbin and its datasette were the centre of my world: turbo loaders, loading screens you learned by heart, and the special agony of a tape counter that lied. The first game I ever owned was The Way of the Exploding Fist, on cassette of course, and the scream on its loading screen genuinely scared me. I did own a disk drive for a short while, but I never bought a single game for it, so if something on this list never got a cassette release I almost certainly played it as a crack on a floppy towards the end. The originals I did buy, Exploding Fist, Saboteur, Aliens, The Neverending Story, were all tape.
If you make me pick a top three: The Last Ninja is my all-time C64 favourite, which is why his eyes are watching you from behind this page. Commando is second, the second game I ever bought, because the arcade was too expensive and the C64 version got hammered instead. Defender of the Crown takes third. All three stand entirely on their own rather than being measured against an arcade original. Ghosts'n Goblins is my favourite arcade game of them all, but the C64 conversion never lived up to the real thing, so it misses the podium here. These days I repair the actual arcade boards for both Commando and Ghosts'n Goblins, so that love story continued in the Arcades section ;)
Below are the 30 games of those years, in release order, earliest first. The carousel and the list both click through to a page per game with the story of what it was and what it meant to me. It all stops in 1987 for a simple reason: late that year an Amiga 500 landed on my desk, and the C64's late golden age happened without me.
