Sam's Journey -ish

When someone says a new game for the Commodore 64, most people imagine something from the 1980s. But the modern homebrew scene proves that this machine still has something to offer, and platformers in the spirit of Sam's Journey are the best proof of that. A few screens are enough and you see exactly what makes new C64 games so fascinating: technology that would have seemed impossible in the eighties, running on forty-year-old iron.

Platformers of this type bet on the brisk movement of the hero, smooth scrolling, and colorful, detailed worlds full of enemies and secret nooks. The player jumps through a series of levels, collects items, avoids traps, and searches for hidden paths. What distinguishes modern homebrew from period games is the degree of technical polish. Creators today know the C64 hardware far better than most of their predecessors and can squeeze effects out of the SID and VIC-II chips that the original developers never even dreamed of.

The modern C64 scene is interesting in its context too. It arises from pure passion for a machine that commercially retired long ago, and yet it keeps around it an active community of programmers, graphic artists, and musicians. These games often come out in physical form on cassettes or cartridges with printed covers, as a tribute to the original era, and their production quality tends to be comparable to or better than the commercial titles from the computer's heyday.

A platformer of this style is thus not only an entertaining game but also a small demonstration of how the retro scene lives in the twenty-first century. For a player who grew up on the Commodore, it is a homecoming with technology they would not have expected back then. And for a newcomer it is perfect proof that the magic of 8-bit graphics and music has not aged, it has just landed in the hands of more experienced creators.

Why play: A modern platformer that shows how far today's homebrew scene can push the old Commodore 64, with technique and polish worthy of the best classics of the genre.