Several years back, I started work on a web project I had been kicking around in my head for several years before that. I had an idea for a video game history website, one focused on Atari, and all the companies, consoles and games that were somehow involved with the granddaddy of the industry. I started pretty strongly, but after a while I let it gather dust as I became distracted by other shiny things. This lasted for yet another few years, but now I've returned to it, and have been adding content steadily for the past year. In a couple of weeks I hope to be finished with yet another "chapter:" screen captures and audio clips of my Commodore 64 collection. I'm going to brag a bit more formally in the forums once I'm through, but if anyone is curious, feel free to have a look. Right now I'm working on screen caps for the Commodore 64 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game. Playing this game has stirred a lot of memories, and has continued to be a source of adventure, if not always good adventure.

Back in the day I was a huge Turtles freak. The cartoons, the movie, the games, I devoured them all, over and over again. Strangely enough, I didn't read the comics and honestly wasn't all that aware of them. But everything else, I had to have. Especially the arcade game. Some kids "saved" their lunch money to buy snacks and toys after school. I saved mine for the arcade. And almost to the quarter, it all went into a Turtles machine. I prided myself on getting so good I could beat the game in less than five bucks... and then I would start over again. A few times parents even put quarters in for me so I could keep the game going longer for their five-or-six-year-old. Suffice it to say, the game was by far the only one I cared to play for at least a year, and I dreamed of one day being able to play it at home, and save my lunch money for... lunch. Right.

Anyway, around that time of course was when Nintendo was dominating the home market with the NES. I didn't own a Nintendo. I didn't like what had happened to my beloved Atari seemingly at the hands of Nintendo, and I wasn't going to get an NES no matter how many good games it got. Then it got TMNT, and I seethed with jealousy. But an NES was still out of the question, so I tried to figure out how else I might TMNT gaming goodness at home. Also around this time was when I picked up my first Commodore 64, a cast-off from my high school band director. I wondered, maybe the Commodore could get the game? Many times I doodled sketches and ideas, trying to see how the arcade game could be crammed into a Commodore disk. The odds didn't seem good. I already had Double Dragon for the Commodore, and while it was decent, it lost a lot in the translation. Figuring that was as good as side-scrolling beat-'em-ups got on the Commodore, TMNT seemed too much to hope for. Besides which, the '80s were over, and nobody was really making games for the Commodore anymore.

Imagine my surprise when I walked into a Babbage's a few months later and discovered Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game in the Commodore section! To say I was happy is a slight understatement. I grabbed it, rushed it home, shoved it into the disk drive and, well, nothing at first, but that's because I had one of those 1541's that was always falling out of alignment. But eventually I got the game to work, and spent many blissful hours getting my Turtles fix. I was also happy to see that, even though there were some obvious compromises and even a few head-scratchers, the game exceeded what I thought was possible on the 64. Actually Konami did even better with their Commodore port of the Simpsons arcade game, but as for TMNT, it was good enough. And for me, "good enough" was perfect. There was just one really bad flaw...

Fast forward to last week, when I pulled the disk out of its semi-retirement and fired it up again. I was saddened to see side 2 had gone corrupt, cutting off all but the first level and a half of the game. But that didn't have to be a permanent loss, because I own an XE1541 cable! If I could only find it... One game room turned upside-down later, I found it, and also found the disk images for the game online... except, they were for the first TMNT game, not the arcade game... except... wow, apparently Europe got a different version of that first game, one that actually plays and sounds a whole lot better than what I bought! Of course this was yet another example of Commodore games that were made on one side of the Atlantic Ocean and then got tweaked for sale on the other side, often making the games all but unplayable in the process. But I wasn't concerned with that. I needed the arcade game! I found it at last, and spent the necessary 15 minutes making a real disk out of the D64 files. PC parallel ports and 1541 disk drives aren't exactly known for their speed.

And this is when I discovered that really bad flaw in the game was not because I had a disk that was corrupt from the start. No, the game really did ship with a bug that crashes the game on the next-to-last boss! That big bad brain known as Krang wanders left, almost off-screen, and then nothing happens! No Shredder, no real ending, just, okay, you're on the last screen, congratulations, you've beaten the game as far as there is a game to beat. And then I started thinking about that first TMNT game again, and how bad its game mechanics are in the U.S. version. Didn't any of those games get any sort of QA before they were shipped off? These gaffes make the 7800's Impossible Mission look pristine by comparison! Oh well, at least I have MAME. I even own a Nintendo now, along with the Turtles arcade game.

Addictions to green super heroes, rage at Nintendo, predictably unpredictable Commodore hardware, programming wizardry stopped cold by obvious bugs, Europeans getting better games than Americans, the always-fragile art of reviving '80s hardware with 2000's technology... all in a week's work while building the Games of Atari website!