The Story of the C64 in Pixels: Book Review.
The story of the Commodore 64 in pixels, is another title in a long line of retro related books from Retro Fusion mastermind Chris Wilkins, this time it’s a trip down memory lane for us C64 and retro gaming enthusiasts.
As usual the quality of the book and its binding is very good and the cover has a lovely embossed logos across the front, in all there are 260 odd pages covering games, music, interviews and so on. The book begins with a brief history of Commodore, penned by Roger Kean, including the back-story of its founder, Jack Tramiel and much more besides. What I would say is most seasoned C64 fans will know most of this information but its fascinating to read these stories from other people’s perspectives. Finally there is a few pages dedicated to the various C64 models that dotted the computing landscape back in the day, including the Commodore PET, VIC-20, and the 128 models.
The next section is all about the games, with 70 games being covered in total, each is given a two-page spread that includes screenshots, boxart, year published, publisher name, and author. Some of my favorites like Platoon from Ocean, Uridium from Hewson and Thing on a Spring from Gremlin. Most are instantly recognisable and rekindle many fond memories, what is a surprise to me is that Chris managed to include some titles I’d never seen before.
In The Memoirs, its a roundup of 8-bit legends. Andrew Hewson, The Oliver Twins, Simon Butler, Ben Daglish, Jon Hare, Gary Penn, Paul Docherty and many more. For me this is possibly the biggest reason I love these books as I do, just gives it that special individual touch many other books can’t replicate.
Another fantastically simple book for the retro mad people that we all are.
-
7/10
Summary
Another fantasticly simple book for the retro mad people that we all are.
Retro head and key holder of RVG.