How the Commodore 64 Shaped a Generation of German Game Developers

German gamers bought the Commodore 64 by the million, while the teenagers who learned to program on the system helped build Germany’s games industry. One reason this gaming platform shaped a generation of game developers in the country is that it was homegrown. Germany had a computer magazine that taught a generation to code, and a cracking scene that trained them further.

Was the Commodore 64 Really That Big in Germany?

Yes, and there’s a date for it. Commodore marked the millionth C64 sold in Germany on December 5, 1986, at the BMW Museum in Munich. It was a celebrated moment and a milestone for what is now one of the retro gaming’s most iconic periods.

Overall, the total number of 64s sold in Germany surpassed 3 million, according to the c64-wiki for Commodore. Serial number analysis by Michael Steil puts worldwide production at about 12.5 million. Commodore’s 1993 annual report cites 17 million, and founder Jack Tramiel later claimed 22 to 30 million. 

Let’s put it somewhere in the middle at 20 million. That would mean Germany made up for 15% of global sales. By any standards, that’s a huge success for Commodore.

How the Magazine 64’er Taught Teenagers to Code, Then Got Them Hired

If you lived through the Commodore 64 era, you may already know that German teenagers learned to program from a magazine. The magazine was the 64’er, which launched at CeBIT in April 1984 and ran until 1999. Through the 1980s, every issue carried program listings you typed in by hand, plus programming courses.

64’er also held reader competitions, and two participants from the 1986 event later worked for Rainbow Arts, an influential retro gaming company. 

• Chris Hülsbeck won the 64’er music competition
• Manfred Trenz won the 64’er graphics competition

Later that year, 64’er published Hülsbeck’s own music editor, SoundMonitor, as its listing of the month. Any reader into coding could type in the code published in the magazine. The result was a working music editor for the price of an evening coding session.

What Did Germany’s C64 Cracking Scene Teach?

The truth is that Germany’s C64 cracking scene taught less than legend might suggest. Still, we cannot argue it didn’t influence Germany’s ability to produce a generation of game developers and code crackers.

Scene accounts place the start of the European cracking scene in West Germany around 1983, though records show it growing across northwestern Europe at the same time. 

The goal for most hobbyists as well as serious coders was to remove game copy protection. It meant working in somebody else’s machine code. 

Most readers of the 64’er were already accustomed to code and, at the time, if you had basic programming knowledge, cracking a game with the right tools was not as difficult as you might think. And so cracking became a thing, so much so that those who were good at it ended up learning a marketable skill that landed them real jobs.

Retired crackers routinely went on to work as programmers and IT consultants. Yes, cracking itself was illegal, and so prevalent was the problem in Germany itself that West German police raided crackers’ homes around the turn of the decade and imposed fines.

Yet the large cracking scene in Germany also meant a generation of gamers had built a skill set. One that was in demand in a growing industry where the need for coders kept rising. 

You also have to think this was before the internet, and many of those coders went on to become Java and Python developers or project managers on projects that required a large amount of coding, including within the online gaming industry.

Which German Studios Came Out of the C64 Era?

Germany already had an unusual number of coders and crackers because of the 64’er magazine’s popularity. With so much coding talent, four studios emerged from the C64 era.

Rainbow Arts published The Great Giana Sisters in 1987 under its in-house label Time Warp. Armin Gessert and Manfred Trenz designed it: Trenz drew the visuals, Gessert wrote the rest of the code.

Nintendo objected to the game’s resemblance to Super Mario Bros. and sent a letter rather than filing suit. Soft-Gold founder Jürgen Goeldner later said the two sides settled out of court, with Rainbow Arts paying Nintendo and pulling the game. The British distributor withdrew it in 1988. An announced ZX Spectrum version was never released.

Trenz stayed with Rainbow Arts and built Turrican in 1990, scored by Chris Hülsbeck, Ramiro Vaca and Stefan Hartwig.

What German Indexing Law Did to a Game

German law didn’t ban games. It removed them from view. In December 1984, the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften, the federal body for media considered harmful to young people, indexed its first games. River Raid was one of three that day, alongside the C64 title Speed Racer.

Shops couldn’t display an indexed title openly or advertise it. It remained legal to own, but the hassle took many indexed titles off the market anyway. River Raid stayed on the list until 2003.

Did the Commodore 64 Help Create Germany’s Game Industry?

The operative word here is ‘help’. The C64 didn’t ‘create’ Germany’s game industry, but it certainly helped. It also didn’t ‘help’ create the country’s gaming industry alone. The combination of the C64 and the 64’er magazine gave German teenagers the means to learn to code. In particular, as the C64’s use case was mostly seen as a desktop/game console, it makes sense that most coders used the system to create games. 

It stands to reason that Germany produced an unusually high number of coders, and many of them, whether creating or cracking games, ended up coding for Germany’s game industry.

FAQ

What was a type-in listing?

Program source code printed in the magazine, entered by hand. As listings grew long, 64’er ran a program service selling the same code on cassette and disk.

Why did Nintendo object to The Great Giana Sisters?

Nintendo’s letter listed the similarities between its level designs and those of Super Mario Bros., and told Rainbow Arts to stop selling the game. Composer Chris Hülsbeck later described it as a nasty letter.

Were crackers actually prosecuted in Germany?

Some were. Scene archives hold a warrant issued in November 1989 against a Radwar member, whose house search turned up 1,157 C64 disks. Proceedings were dropped in January 1990 because the accused was a young offender.

When did the C64 era end in Germany?

There’s no clean end date. The clearest marker is 64’er itself, which ran until January 1999, long after the C64 had stopped being a current machine.

Did Hülsbeck and Trenz keep working in games?

Both did. Hülsbeck wrote the music for the Turrican series into the 1990s, and Trenz followed it with Super Turrican on the NES in 1992, which he designed, programmed, drew and scored himself.