Oh my beloved C64! I made my first “real” games with it, my buddies were artistic and made the music, sprites, animations, etc. I programmed the tools to make them!

The worst aspect of the C64 was that the hardware was a mostly undocumented mystery zone. As an early teen, I had the C64 programmer’s reference manual checked out of our library for 2 years!!! Doing any kind of advanced graphics meat PEEKing and POKEing random addresses and registers and interrupts to see what would happen. A nightmare! My hat’s off to all the demo scene folks that did ludicrous stuff

edit: My first released game was “Studmaster” replete with every horrible thing your mind is currently imaging lmao. I’m not proud of this now but it was pretty wild for two 14 year old kids in the 80’s to make a small-scale text/graphic adventure game and publish it

I wonder if history will repeat with PCs, and especially handheld PCs, a market which the Steam Deck effectively sparked into life, while Nintendo, PS, and Xbox crash and burn should there be a second Video Game Crash any time soon.

Because all three of the current console vendors aren’t doing great at all, in fact Xbox is basically already dead and even the Switch 2 seems DOA as far as exclusives go and it’s very much maligned by the press atm, while PC seems to be doing fine comparatively especially considering the success of the Steam Deck and the other PC handhelds which followed it.