Commodore 64-uk and Us releases

[gooner73]

Just been wondering about the differences between the Uk and Us market for games, i have Pang, Toki,robocop and navy seals carts for the c64, but never seem to see them on ebay form the us. were they released over there or was it just a european thing?

 

also there a few big arcade conversions with different versions-ikari warriors, space harrier, 720 etc, so i assume it was not like it is now where one company make the games for all countries?

 

There is always lots of Uk bashing by the Us and a definite feeling of superiority form there, but what they seem to not be able to grasp was the price of disk drives over here, stupidly expensive and more than the price of the machines, so tapes became the better option and sold more than disks for this reason, but did the Us have tape games too or was it disk only?

 

any answers would be great!

[high voltage]

US gave up tapes early 80s, as fdds became widely the format of choice, thanks to Apple ][.

 

In UK tapes ruled due to the Sinclair Spectrum being the dominant force there, hence all games were put on tape for C64 too, and most British C64 users couldn't afford fdds anyway.

That doesn't mean games weren't on floppy, most British companies released both options for C64, but for 100 cassettes maybe they sold two disks.

I always had to order the disk version of a C64 game from my local computer shop in UK, since I grew up on fdds, being an Atari 8bit user as well as a C64 user.

 

UK vs US bashing. Well, most UK games on tapes were like cheap, banged up on the weekend affair, only a few UK companies really made excellent games, Thalamus, System 3, Level 9, couple of Domark titles, Gremlin. Those were the good, professional companies.

Remember most games were written for the Spectrum, they didn't have to look or sound good.

 

In US you had EA, Microprose, Origin, Accolade, Activision, SSI, Infocom, Sirius, Sir-Tech, Atari, Sublogic, Synapse, Broderbund, Mindscape and many more, all these companies released classic titles on disk.

As David Crane stated in Hi-Res, a good game takes almost a year to develop. In UK most companies didn't have the funds to carry out this sort of work.

 

As for British companies releasing games for all countries, many software houses from the UK released games throughout Europe, eg the main market in Europe, Germany. In Germany they also used fdds with their C64s so most British games came to Germany on floppy too.

America is a different story, many companies didn't have the resources to release games in the US. Mastertronic, funnily enough managed to do so. Ocean maybe tried and failed? Some US companies like Epyx released a few UK titles under different names, EA did so too, but I don't think they became hits over there.

 

The carts you're talking about were the late 80s releases from the UK for the C64GS, by by then US had long abandoned carts. They were released in small quantities.

Edited March 19, 2012 by high voltage

[gooner73]

so it kind of went the opposite way in the end, as carts were not common here really, bar a few early games, but then they tried to make it the format of choice just as america had given up on carts.

I also had an atari 800xl, which i got quite cheaply with a disc drive, but by then software releases were pretty low quality in comparison with the early 800 games, like Mr.do, spelunker,Bruce lee etc.And again they were hard to come by on disk, so ended up getting a 1010 data player and got the better games on tape.

 

I think i only knew one person with a ffds and he only had a few games where we all had plenty on tape.

 

most people had spectrum, or amstrads, in the early days there were a few bbc and electron owners that i knew, but the bbc was pretty much unaffordable for the average family back then.

 

i suppose we were lucky in the uk, in that there was alot of choice for home computers and lots of fun to be had trying out the different formats on a saturday morning in currys and dixons!

[TMR]

Just been wondering about the differences between the Uk and Us market for games, i have Pang, Toki,robocop and navy seals carts for the c64, but never seem to see them on ebay form the us. were they released over there or was it just a european thing?

 

The US had moved away from the C64 by the time those large bank switching cartridges from European devs like Ocean and Domark started to appear.

 

also there a few big arcade conversions with different versions-ikari warriors, space harrier, 720 etc, so i assume it was not like it is now where one company make the games for all countries?

 

No, because PAL and NTSC C64s have different timings so anything travelling between the US and Europe almost always requires modification; that's why US games like Rocket Ranger needed to be fixed for Europe and Wizball or Delta had to drop their upper border status bars because they wouldn't have been visible on NTSC. As far as conversions go, in some cases (presumably where source code wasn't available) it was probably just deemed easier in the long run to commission someone else to do the work from scratch. In pretty much all the cases i can think of, the European-developed version was the better game...

Edited March 19, 2012 by TMR

[gooner73]

Just been wondering about the differences between the Uk and Us market for games, i have Pang, Toki,robocop and navy seals carts for the c64, but never seem to see them on ebay form the us. were they released over there or was it just a european thing?

 

The US had moved away from the C64 by the time those large bank switching cartridges from European devs like Ocean and Domark started to appear.

 

also there a few big arcade conversions with different versions-ikari warriors, space harrier, 720 etc, so i assume it was not like it is now where one company make the games for all countries?

 

No, because PAL and NTSC C64s have different timings so anything travelling between the US and Europe almost always requires modification; that's why US games like Rocket Ranger needed to be fixed for Europe and Wizball or Delta had to drop their upper border status bars because they wouldn't have been visible on NTSC. As far as conversions go, in some cases (presumably where source code wasn't available) it was probably just deemed easier in the long run to commission someone else to do the work from scratch. In pretty much all the cases i can think of, the European-developed version was the better game...

 

Agreed , the us version of ikari warriors is pathetic!

I just assumed that once the license was obtained then the only company who could release were the license holders.

[TMR]

Agreed , the us version of ikari warriors is pathetic!

I just assumed that once the license was obtained then the only company who could release were the license holders.

 

Licenses were based on all sorts of things; most licenses only covered a limited territory and in many later cases when companies began to fully understand what IP was worth, a finite timespan too. Most of the coin-op companies had US arms to publish C64 games but nothing in place for Europe so licensing was almost a random element; Afterburner went to Activision, Outrun to US Gold, Space Harrier to Elite and in two out of three cases the European code was then NTSC converted and sold under the Sega banner in the US (the exception there is Afterburner, the US release is totally different code and significantly better than the European release).