Commodore 64 Games I Played Trivia Quiz

Answer: BurgerTime

"BurgerTime" is a delightfully goofy puzzle game where you play as Peter Pepper, a tiny chef who apparently skipped culinary school and is beating feet to make food. Your job is to walk across giant ingredients like patties, buns, and lettuce to drop them into trays and assemble hamburgers.

This would be a dream job if you weren't constantly hunted by a gang of rogue groceries, including a homicidal hot dog, an eccentric egg, and a psychotic pickle. To survive, you have to stomp on your ingredients to crush your edible enemies or blast them in the face with a limited supply of pepper. Still better than flipping fries.

Answer: Archon

"Archon" is what happens when you take chess and turn it into a magical, supernatural bar fight. Instead of boring wooden pieces, you control teams of mythic monsters like glowing wizards, fire-breathing dragons, and terrifying banshees battling on a shifting grid. Each piece has different powers.

When two pieces land on the same square, the game suddenly teleports you into an action arena where you must fight to the death in real-time. It is a blend of brainy strategy and frantic button-mashing. Chess is much better when you can blast your opponent with a fireball.

Answer: Mail Order Monsters

"Mail Order Monsters" is a sci-fi dream come true for anyone who ever wanted to build their own giant alien (or dino) gladiator. In this game, you play as a mad scientist who uses a catalog to buy monster bodies like giant squids or robotic dinosaurs. You then genetically modify them with heavy armor and wild weapons like psychic blasts, lasers, and rocket launchers. Once your custom beast is ready, you send it into deadly arenas to battle other monsters for cash, fame, and better body parts.

Answer: International Karate

"International Karate" is a global vacation where you travel to beautiful, exotic destinations just to kick your best friend in the face. Unlike modern fighting games where characters survive getting hit by cars, in this game a single solid punch or kick stops the action completely while a wise old referee hands out points. You can execute sixteen different moves using a single joystick, but button mashing will only get you flattened.

The game was unsuccessfully sued by Data East, basically trying to argue that they owned the legal copyright to martial arts.

It features an iconic, fast-paced music track and bonus rounds where you smash boards with your bare forehead, proving that peak athletic performance is all about determination and a total disregard for mild CTE.

Answer: Ghosts 'n Goblins

"Ghosts 'n Goblins" is a notoriously brutal arcade port where you control Arthur, a brave knight who frequently fights zombies while wearing nothing but his polka-dot underwear. Your quest is to rescue a princess from Satan, but the game is so relentlessly difficult that you are far more likely to end up as a pile of bones within thirty seconds. If a monster touches you once, your armor instantly shatters into dust, leaving you in your boxers for a stressful mad dash to the next level.

The developers chopped the original seven stages down to just four so the game could run without annoying load times.

It features a legendary, spooky soundtrack based on classical piano music and a difficulty level that will make you want to hurl your joystick straight through a brick wall.

Answer: Ultima V

"Ultima V" is a massive role-playing game where you are summoned back to a magical kingdom that has turned into a grumpy neighborhood watch program run by a dictator. While the rightful king is missing, a creepy replacement ruler decides to legally enforce the rules of being a good person. This means citizens are executed if they do not donate half their money to charity, and lying will literally get a person's tongue cut out. The game features a groundbreaking day and night cycle where townspeople actually leave their shops to go to bed, forcing you to awkwardly wait outside until sunrise to buy a sword.

Commodore 64 players had to swap floppy disks constantly just to take a few steps, but owners of the fancier Commodore 128 model got treated to an exclusive musical soundtrack that made the extreme disk-swapping feel much more majestic. Scott LeBlanc had the 128...my C64 got laughed at.

Answer: Summer Games

"Summer Games" turned competitive button-mashing into an Olympic event or vice versa. You and up to seven of your friends can choose a country to represent before competing in classic events like diving, gymnastics, track, and swimming. Instead of just holding down a button, you have to wiggle your joystick back and forth as fast as humanly possible, which resulted in thousands of broken joysticks and very sore wrists worldwide.

The game has an incredibly detailed opening ceremony where a digital athlete lights a torch and releases a flock of birds into the sky, which I remember being absolutely mind-blowing in 1985. It is a wildly fun multiplayer game that captures all the glory of the Olympics, provided you do not snap your joystick in half during the 100-meter dash. I broke at least four joysticks on this game. Mom eventually took away the floppy disk.

Answer: Commando

"Commando" is an action-packed, vertically scrolling military shooter where you control Super Joe, a lone soldier who apparently offended an entire country because he is dropped off in the middle of a jungle to fight thousands of enemy troops all by himself. I am sure that this didn't violate any IP...*wink* Armed with just a machine gun and a few hand grenades, you must blast your way through enemy lines while dodging bullets, vehicles, and soldiers who pop out of the bushes like terrifying, armed jack-in-the-boxes.

The development team was in such a frantic rush to sell the game that they chopped the arcade version's eight levels down to just three. In fact, the programmer had to completely delete an entire level just to fit the game's legendary background music onto the tiny computer chip. That said, the sacrificed level was worth it because the catchy, military-style soundtrack is one of the greatest chiptune masterpieces in video game history, making your inevitable defeat by a stray bullet feel incredibly heroic.

Answer: Boulder Dash

"Boulder Dash" is a frantic puzzle game where you play as Rockford, a brave little guy who apparently decided that running away from giant, falling rocks in a subterranean maze was a great career choice. Your main goal is to dig through dirt and collect sparkling diamonds while managing gravity, which is a constant nightmare. If you dig out the dirt underneath a heavy boulder, it will instantly plunge downward, threatening to crush your character flat or block the exit. You also have to deal with bizarre underground creatures like explosive butterflies and expanding amoeba blobs that will consume the entire screen if you do not trap them quickly.

It is a tense and addictive game of strategy where a single greedy move can cause a massive cave-in, turning a simple treasure hunt into an early tomb.

Answer: Paradroid

"Paradroid" is a sci-fi action puzzle game where you play as a tiny, helpless robot sent into a fleet of giant space freighters to clear out a massive crew of killer droids. Since your starting robot has absolutely no weapons, your only way to survive is to hijack/hack the bodies of the more powerful enemy droids roaming the ship. To take control of another machine, you enter a mini-game where you must solve a puzzle before the timer runs out. You can also use the droids you have taken over to kill other droids.