COMMODORE PET

The Commodore PET had no bitmap mode. Games were built from PETSCII’s 192-character extended set - block graphics, line-drawing characters, card suits - rendered on a 40-column green phosphor screen. What looks like limitation from today’s vantage point was, for the developers who worked within it, simply the material. Like calligraphers who cannot change their ink, they worked with what they had and found ways to make it mean something.

Derek Hipkin turned those constraints into two of the PET’s most technically accomplished titles: Cosmic Cosmiads (1981), where a fuel mechanic transformed a Space Invaders variant into a resource-management problem, and Cosmic Jailbreak (1982), which adapted Universal’s 1979 coin-op Cosmic Guerilla into a PETSCII prison-break scenario with soldier and general classes, risk-reward targeting decisions, and a jail wall that degraded brick by brick. Peter Jennings had arrived earlier: his 924-byte chess engine became Microchess 2.0 (1978), the first microcomputer game to sell more than 10,000 copies - profits he later deferred to help fund a new project called VisiCalc.

Jim Connelley came to the PET sideways: he bought one to organise his Dungeons and Dragons notes, found it unsuitable for the purpose, and wrote a dungeon crawler instead. Temple of Apshai (1979) sold 20,000 copies by 1981 and 400,000 by 1986, won the Origin Award for Best Computer Game of 1980, and launched the studio that became Epyx.

Flagship deep dives: Cosmiads, Jailbreak, and Microchess →     Full game catalogue →