Castle Magus

Google link.

Apparently, this is the original thing.

This reminds me of when I was a kid. Probably somewhere in the 7-9 years old range. Not long after the first time I played games on my eldest sister's (or her at the time boyfriend's) Commodore 64, I took a sheet of paper and wrote, like, a page or two description of a game on it, just prose and lists, something like that, all handwritten with a pencil. I didn't know shit about how computers worked back then. I showed it to them and said, "Can you plug this in the computer so I can play this game?" or some shit like that. They had to tell me it just doesn't work that way. It's not that simple or easy.

In that spirit, I am here to say: Peter Molyneux, who is 65 years old and has been in the video game industry for over 40 years now... ...it just doesn't work that way. It's not that simple or easy. Not now, not 35 years ago, and not 25 years from now.

(EDIT)

Don't have time to read the whole thing at the moment, but I like this guy's predictions, though (admittedly using an off-kilter definition of "like," anyway):

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Jon Ingold, Inkle co-founder

"In 25 years time, Disney's lawyers will have found a way to copyright the concept of storytelling itself, so it'll be illegal to make any kind of narrative content at all. Games will become purely abstract and non-digital to avoid litigation: multi-dimensional chess sets, playing cards with nine or 10 different suits. Darts will make a big comeback, with customised dartboards featuring pictures of your favourite characters' butts.

"Steam will still exist, but will require developers to pay a monthly subscription to be allowed to host their game, for free, on the platform. Disney's cultural wing will give grants to children to draw pictures of new characters, whom they will then of course own. Poetry will be the language of revolution but will be very hard to understand. Only the poor will pay taxes.

"The Olympics will be held in VR, and the winner in most events will be a shy man from China with a server farm in his cellar. Healthcare will be done by lottery, except for plastic surgery. The Mars colony will be due to open 'next year', every year, but investors will keep piling in the money. Star Citizen will not have come out yet. Peter Molyneux will be working on a new game.

"Bananas will taste different. Bees will be robotic. COVID will still be around, but everyone will pretend it isn't. RPGs will seem over complicated to kids, who will prefer to read books. The sky will be purple. Hawaii will be purely mythical. Destiny 2 will be a subject of academic theological research. A robot called Geoff will announce new games, endlessly, all the time."

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(/EDIT)

(EDIT 2)

And, I guess, to be fair to Peter Molyneux, Shinji Mikami kind of said the same thing in that list of predictions, that games will just be mostly made by AI in the future. Go figure. It's still a bonkers prediction, in my opinion.

(/EDIT 2)

"This is episode 198 of the Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN), a review of the Commodore 64 and a bunch of it's licensed and weirder games. The Commodore 64, also known as the C64 or the CBM 64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International. The C64 took its name from its 64 kibibytes of RAM. With support for multicolor sprites and a custom chip for waveform generation, the C64 could create superior visuals and audio compared to systems without such custom hardware. Except, well, the software was kinda garbage."

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I'm pretty sure that the Commodore 64 is the first system on which I ever played a video game in someone's home, pre-Arcadia 2001, pre-Atari 7800, and pre-NES. It was certainly the first time I ever played video games in my (parents') home. The one I spent the most time on belonged to my youngest sister, who had already long since moved out of our parents' house, and I first played it in the house she was living in at the time, but after that, for a span of several years, that same C64 was relocated to my (parents') house, when her kids (i.e. my nieces, the oldest of whom is only four years younger than me) started staying there, between the time when we got home after school in the afternoon and when my sister got home from work later in the evening (and then, later on, when they started actually spending the night at my [parents'] house something like two or three nights a week during a period of a year or three when my sister was taking classes at a night school). But even before that, I remember my oldest sister also had one for a little while. Whereas the games on the one my youngest sister owned were all on floppy disks, the games on this other one were all in cartridge format. The main thing I recall from the one my older sister had was that they had GEOS for it (which I mainly remember for geoPaint).

I'll list off the games I remember playing for C64 as a kid: Donkey Kong, Defender, Congo Bongo, Dig Dug, Ghostbusters, Choplifter, Raid on Bungeling Bay, Summer Games, Robotron 2084, Centipede, and Labyrinth. There were almost assuredly others, but I can't recall them now.

I wanted to say World Class Leaderboard Golf as well, but I can't find the right video (that one there isn't it). I might actually be confusing it with the DOS version, as I definitely remember those bird calls at the start, and it definitely had those voice clips included with it, and that looks more like the version I remember playing... but I also (maybe incorrectly) recall playing it in the living room at my (parents') house as a kid, and the only thing we ever had in that room was the Commodore 64, so... I'm not really sure what's up with that. Maybe the C64 version did have those sound/voice bits and improved graphics too? I dunno...

I also recall two different "music videos," which I definitely can't find on Youtube or anything like that now. One was a version of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" that had a pixelated Michael Jackson dancing onscreen. The other was a version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" except that I distinctly recall that it was renamed "Somewhere Over the RAMbow," i.e. a play on RAM and such. It was basically just the lyrics of the original song played on screen, but changed to be computer themed. I also recall being disappointed the very first time I ran it, because I thought it was a Rambo game, but it was cool enough for what it actually was. Ah well.