Welcome

Cassette 50 was an infamous collection of games published by Cascade in 1983 and an early example of shovelware, marketed on the basis of sheer quantity rather than the quality or playability of its games.

This competition is about creating a brand new compilation tape - with any proceeds to be donated to charity - featuring games by C64 developers of all levels of experience, focusing on great gameplay in a mini-game format while still retaining the look or feel of a Cassette 50 game, such as it was!         

To help achieve that aesthetic, pose an exciting challenge and keep entries to a manageable scope alongside your other projects, there will be a tight limit on the amount of memory your game can use, with every custom character or sprite to make your game more pleasing to the eye coming at the cost of less space for gameplay code or data. To help get the ideas flowing we will provide a set of chars and sprites from the original Cassette 50 games. You are free to use these, design your own graphics, or for a real challenge stick to good old-fashioned Petscii like many of the original games. DOWNLOAD HERE

If your game qualifies based on the rules below and is judged to be one of the top-10 based on the voting criteria, you will receive a free copy of the physical tape release to be produced by PhoenixWare.

Competition Rules

    The competition deadline is 23:59 GMT on the 31st March, 2021. All entries to be submitted by EMAIL to support@thervgsquad.co.uk
    Final code must be in .PRG format that loads into memory below $1000 hex, giving 4,096 bytes of address space.
    At no point can the code write to any location at or above $1000, however using IO normally at $D000-$DFFF is allowed, as is calling BASIC or KERNAL routines. BASIC programs are welcome too, just be sure to start your program with POKE 56,16:CLR so it conforms to the memory limits.
    Feel free to make creative use of memory $0400, every byte counts!
    The games must be previously unreleased and your own work, whether that be by yourself or as part of a collaboration.
    PAL must be supported, with additional NTSC support optional (but encouraged).
    Participants may submit multiple entries, either as an individual or within a team. Team entries must be registered by an individual, and any potential prizes will be sent to the registered individual only.
    Entries should be submitted exclusively to the Cassette 50 Comp by the competition deadline. Please feel free to share as you wish after the competition deadline has passed.
    There will be a panel of judges (TBA), and entries will be scored on a point distribution basis across several criteria. The decision of the panel is final.
    Judges *CAN* enter games themselves, but cannot self-vote (award points to their own release).
    Games must be submitted as freeware.
    Qualifying games will be published on a cassette tape compilation by Phoenix Ware, and all proceeds after costs from the sales will be donated to Special Effect Charity.

Read more here https://itch.io/jam/the-c64-cassette-50-charity-competition