We spoke with Jesper Juul about his latest book, Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer.
Jesper Juul is a Danish video game theorist, designer and author who has been a respected voice within the field of video game studies for many years. He’s also written a number of books, and his latest book was published by MIT Press in December.
The book is called Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer, and deals in part with a subject we’ve been talking about many times here at Spillhistorie.no: The Commodore 64 was for a long time the world’s best-selling home computer ever, and the platform that had by far the most commercial game releases. A lot of today’s major genres first took shape on this platform, and a lot of the most important game developers got their start there. It was a hugely influential platform. Yet it’s hard to find anyone in the international (English-language) games press, or even game researchers, who treat it as anything but a footnote in the history of video games. Why is that?
We recently spoke with Juul about his career and work in general, and the book and the Commodore 64 in particular. Here’s our conversation:
Could you introduce yourself to our readers? Who are you, and what is the nature of your occupation?
I am a video game theorist. I teach video game theory and design at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, but I have also taught at MIT and New York University. I occasionally work as a game developer and programmer too.
Too Much Fun is my fifth book about video games. I have previously written about why the rules of video games are important, why small games are fun, about why we play video games even though they often make us unhappy, and about indie games. So yeah, it is my job to write about, design, and hopefully also play video games.
What set you down this career path?
I had been working as a web/game developer, and I had been on the demoscene. When I was finishing my university studies (Nordic Literature), I realized that I could write about video games. This turned out to be much more interesting than I thought. Now I have been doing it for 20 years. For me, analyzing game design or studying the game industry just adds extra layers to my fascination with games.
Could you tell us a bit about your latest book on the Commodore 64, Too Much Fun?
Too Much Fun is a biography of the Commodore 64 that tries to solve two mysteries: 1) why is the C64 missing in so much game and computer history? and 2) how did the C64 live so long and be so many different things to different people?
Too Much Fun starts before the C64 was designed, it shows the inspiration from arcade games into its chips, and then I argue that the C64 could live so long – it was produced from 1982-1994 – because it had five «lives». People thought of it as entirely different computers even though Commodore never upgraded it.
First life: It was promoted primarily as a serious computer for work, studies, and learning BASIC programming.
Second life: It came to be seen as a game computer. I especially write about the history of C64 action-adventure games from Wanted: Monty Mole to Impossible Mission to Cauldron to Turrican.
Third life: The demoscene developed as a subculture of competing about how to make cutting edge graphical and sound programs showing off new «impossible» tricks.
Fourth life: In the late 1980s, the machine began to feel old, and developers tried to keep up with the Amiga and PCs, making C64 versions of games like Lemmings, and new graphical interfaces like GEOS.
Fifth life: Today the limitations of the C64 are charming. The C64 is an interesting historical device where it’s again interesting to make new games and demos. Notice that on CSDB and Lemon64, most of the top games and demos were made within the last 5 years! There is definitely a resurgence of interest.
What made you decide to focus on the Commodore 64 for this book?
The C64 was my first computer, and I spent some intense years in high school, when I should probably have been doing my homework, learning to program, cracking games, and spending time with C64 friends. At some point I decided to «grow up» and be serious about my studies etc…, but now that I have been writing about video games, I wondered why we never mention the C64. I know the editors of the Platform Studies series who asked if I would be interested in writing the C64, and I realized it could be interesting to go back and look at the machine again and try to figure out what its role really was.
The book is not a simple celebration of the C64, I wanted to be serious about what it did and what it didn’t do, and I found a lot of interesting data about the fact that it was the platform with the largest game library from 1985-1993, and the differences between the US and European markets, for example. I am also not shy to admit that the disk drive was too slow.
Who is this book for?
I have tried to make a readable book for anyone who is interested in game or computer history, in how a machine can last for 40 years when a modern phone can only last for 4, and for those who had a C64, or those who are curious about what it was and what it did.
In what ways do you think we can still feel/see the Commodore 64’s influence in the world of gaming today?
There is an obvious heritage in games like SimCity which was developed on the C64 first, based on its scrolling facilities and sprites. We also know that the game Siren City was part of the inspiration for Grand Theft Auto. We know that Little Computer People inspired The Sims. We know that all the European developers like Rare (Donkey Kong Country, Battletoads) had grown up on C64 and ZX Spectrum action-adventure games.
I also think the open-world game genres (say Elite and Pirates) was developed on the C64.
I think the C64 also showed that yes, a computer should have color, sound, and games.
There’s a lot of nostalgia for the Commodore 64, but not a lot of serious discussion about its place in gaming history. Why do you think that is?
The main reason is that there is a default US story of game history about «The Crash» in 1983, in which the video game market crashed around 1983 and was then rescued by Nintendo a few years later. We often copy this history even in Europe, even though our history was completely different. In the book I show that the first really successful Nintendo home console in Europe was the Wii in 2006. The crash was mostly local to the US, and it ignores that the home computer game market, even in the US continued unabated. Companies like Activision, Electronic Arts, and LucasArts got their start making home computer, including C64, games in the 1980s.
Once you have that history set up, people keep repeating it, and we tend to forget all the home computer games – or even just the Sega games.
A second reason is, as the title says, that the C64 was «Too Much Fun». Journalists avoided writing about such an unserious computer with all its color, sound, and games. Remember that IBM PCs and Macs were terrible for action games until the early 1990s – a ten-year delay from the C64, the Atari 8-bit and Amiga. Eventually all computers have become like the C64, but popular histories like the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley reduced computer history to Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates, and therefore deleted the C64 and other home computers.
We’d like to thank Jesper Juul for his time. You can find more information on Too Much Fun on his website, and you should also follow his blog, The Ludologist.
Also be sure to check out some of the other English-langue articles we’ve published.
Related articles:
- Interview with Linus «lftkryo» Åkesson about YouTube, the demoscene, et.c.
- Interview with Niklas Nylund at the Finnish Museum of Games
By Joachim Froholt.