The 8-Bit Experience - The Commodore Plus/4: The Definitive Review
Riding behind the wave, 48KB down
I received a Commodore Plus/4 for Christmas in 1985. This hugely significant event happened because of two things; Commodore had reduced the price for a Plus/4 starter pack to £99.99 and my dad refused to buy a ZX Spectrum as the rubber keys meant it “wasn’t a real computer”. This combination of infuriating dogmatism and infuriating dogmatism lead to me owning a computer that was solely mine. My Dad had inexplicably bought a Texas Instruments TI99/4A a year previously, but as with so many of the also-rans from the first half of the 1980s, that silver-bodied modempunk beauty failed to capture the attention of British software publishers and therefore withered on the vine. After I’d exhausted the single game we had for it (a cartridge version of TI Invaders, a Space Invaders clone), the machine just gathered dust. Wanting a machine with some degree of gaming potential, I’d lobbied hard for a replacement and it turned out the drastic discounting of the Plus/4 sealed our destinies.
The key thing about the Plus/4 was that along with the 1, its split-SKU companion, it had garnered enough attention to get support from several UK publishers. Three in the premium bracket, and a similar number at the budget end. Given that the budget tier was only just coming to maturity by the end of 1985, those £1.99 labels followed a broad spectrum approach, catering for a wider range of formats than you’d probably expect. Given the domination of the ZX Spectrum, Commodore C64 and Amstrad CPC machines, it was surprising to see the likes of Mastertronic2 catering for the kings but also the lower pawns. It wasn’t uncommon to see releases for the Acorn Electron, Atari 8-Bits and so on alongside the C16/+4 offerings, although these would slowly whittle down as the mid-80s drew on. Certainly Atari’s launch of the 16-bit ST, the subsequent UK TV campaigns and blanket all-formats magazine advertising seemingly killed the 400/800 8-bit platform overnight. The Electron and BBC split, a somewhat more complex issue than mere RAM sizes, saw that format leave the shelves of the highstreet retailers around the same time. There was certainly a moment where the lowly C16/+4 shelf (amongst the vast multi-shelf libraries of the big three) grew larger than its lower-tier competitors, although by this point we all felt like a downtrodden proletariat of equally under-supported peers. Somehow, the C16/+4 made it through - possibly thanks to the desperate Christmas discounting of the C16 in 1984 and the Plus/4 in 1985 creating overnight markets of kids eager to buy £1.99 games every two weeks.
But on that Christmas day some 40 years ago, I only had the ten pack-in tapes to pick from. Thankfully, there were some surprisingly decent titles there. Treasure Island satiated my desire for flick-screen adventuring ala Sabre Wulf et al, Exorcist offered an expanded Pac-Man as mazes-in-a-maze adventure and Fire Ant pulled together a passable 2D puzzler themed with insects and underground burrows as a static-screen logic game that could only be worked out with trial and error, but nonetheless was curiously rewarding when you got it right. The real winner, and particularly germane to the season, was Icicle Works, a retooling of the long-forgotten Boulderdash3 format as Santa Claus assembling presents by digging through snow and managing snowballs while dodging polar bears. Coded by Doug Turner,4 Icicle Works was the first Plus/4 game I finished, though by the end of my time with the machine I’d managed to proudly 1CC all four of my favourites. An achievement born as much from the scarcity of releases for the machine as my particular hunger to finish games in that era, but still something I’m oddly proud of. Of course, the real fun started after Christmas when I could get to grips with building a collection. It may have been a mere pauper to the big three, but it was mine and a machine that I could personally invest in. As such, the Plus/4 is utterly foundational in defining the kind of gamer that I would become and thanks to its status as an underling with a hungry audience, it played home to a fair few hand-me-downs that were long in the tooth on the big three.
I had played, fallen in love with and desperately longed for Jet Set Willy and Saboteur on the ZX Spectrum, and naturally lapped them up when the C16/+4 versions came. Jet Set Willy got a conversion via format stalwarts Tynesoft that despite offering a 64KB Plus/4 version, inexplicably fell short of the Spectrum original. Saboteur was even weirder. Released by Durell in 1985, I never saw the Plus/4 version until it was re-released by Alternative as a £1.99 double-header. A frankly bizarre cut-down version for the C16 on one side of the tape, with a near-perfect recreation of the original for the Plus/4 on the other. Naturally, I was delighted. Likewise, we got a perfect version of Manic Miner too, and Firebird - another £1.99 label - brought Thrust. I can’t forget to mention greats like Timeslip,5 Tom Thumb or the Brian Howarth text adventures that taught me to touch-type, but true transcendence came about through the miraculous arrival of Mercenary for the Plus/4; an unlikely port, but a life-changing one for me. I’d bought the game completely blind and was astonished to find it matched the box art with quite some integrity, making it one of the most important games I’d ever play. The stinger being that as a Plus/4-only release, it proved a technical prowess for the system that highlighted just how much the SKU split with the C16 was holding it back. If Mercenary was possible, then so was Elite. And all the other wireframe titles that presage our glorious realtime-polygon future.6
In a mad sense, the underdog Plus/4 did eventually get to shine by playing home to at least a few of the era’s notable greats. A longtime supporter, Gremlin Graphics, even saw fit to release a version of its joyously fun platformer, Monty On The Run. Sadly, much like Jet Set Willy, abiding by the need to accommodate the 16K underling resulted in a lesser experience overall. And yet, Gremlin was behind the release of a platform hero’s best work; Shaun Southern’s7 Trailblazer. Southern’s Plus/4 output is prodigious and varied, having pushed games through premium publishers like Gremlin and budgets like Mastertronic alike. Through him I got to play a very passable Mr Doh! and Pengo hybrid, Tutti Frutti, his take on horizontal bike action Kikstart, a superb Minter-like Centipede shooter P.O.D., a great remodel of Jet Pak as a proto-Tetris in the form of Jetbrix and so on. I saw him as some kind of god, having created such a wide array of different games, and have them be thoroughly decent to boot. He was the first superstar programmer to me, long before I got into gaming mags and learned of the mainstream 8-bit legends.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect to consider about Plus/4 ownership was being in the position of a genuine gaming underclass. There was a mainstream with the big three, where huge licenses would get cross-format triplicate versions and novel IPs would find themselves migrating back and forth, but for the lowly Plus/4 crew, we could only look from afar with envy. I’d get to play just about everything by visiting friends, but I’d always have to return to my Plus/4 and the tidy little collection I was amassing. While I could be distracted into contentment with what I had, the idea that this was a poorer tier than the big three never left me. As such, it left me with burning aspirations and a hunger to explore those other catalogues. Being in a cultural underclass, only seeing the mainstream zeitgeist through friends and magazines, is a humbling experience when your appetite is growing exponentially - but I genuinely think it made me treasure my time with Commodore 64s and Spectrums and Amstrads all the more deeply. And naturally, feel a certain peasant thankfulness for the scraps of greatness I was able to play at home. When eventually I swapped out my Plus/4 for a second-hand Commodore 128 in Christmas 1987, I didn’t quite realise that I’d miss the little dark-grey machine with the white keys as much as I would just a few years later. Looking back now, I can barely believe my Plus/4 ownership only lasted two years. Being so formative, so fundamental to my gaming history, it feels like it was actually some vast chunk of my childhood, and yet I’ve owned a PlayStation 5 for just as long. I had that Commodore 128 for another two years before leaping into the 16-bit consoles early, and it genuinely baffles me that combined, I had Commodore 8-bits for less time than I’ve owned my Xbox Series S.
Time dilation and the affordances of youth are one thing, and it’s perhaps a lovely touch of romance that I think my Plus/4 ownership so fondly for a machine that was always so maligned in the media of the time, and which was equally maligned in any playground format debate. You couldn’t even compete, so I never had to bother. I was able to plough my own little furrow with the few friends who had Plus/4s or C16s. As mentioned, I regretted selling the Plus/4 collection in the late 80s, so when one popped up at a flea market for just £15, I snapped it up. I ended up leaving it with my parents and it went on eBay when they moved, as I didn’t have space. A shame really, as I never got to play anything on it as it didn’t have any games. Fast forward to a few years ago and I bought two off eBay, as the first one died in short order and an untested spares-and-repairs saviour arrived to donate the necessary TED chip and keyboard to gain a working system. I immediately ordered The Future Was 8-Bit’s SD2IEC mini-15418 in Plus/4 colours, and I was back in the glory days of 1986. So many of those little games are still great, in a timeless fashion, that it reminds me of the sheer resilience of the underclass. There’s a sense that survival was really fought-for here, that the system’s diet of games could have fallen into famine at any point. It’s probably that idea of being on a tightrope of survival that added an extra depth to how I feel about that little machine and its gems that I treasure. It wasn’t a vast breadbin, it was tight and compact. Like its catalogue of genuinely good games. It wasn’t my first games machine, and it wasn’t the first computer I got to know, but in the most important ways, it was the first one I loved. And I loved it because it, and the games, were mine. And that’s what really counts - to love a thing in spite of its flaws, in spite of its position in the hierarchy. To love what it gave you because it was simply good.
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The Commodore C16 is the same hardware, but with just 16KB of RAM instead of the Plus/4’s 64KB.
Mastertronic’s catalogue serves as the ideal bellwether for the UK culture at the time. It published for the big three, the Plus/4, Electron/BBC and Ataris but also the MSX, VIC-20 and Dragon 32. It’s fun to look at the catalogue as the 80s draw to a close and see which formats disappear from the release schedules first.
Boulderdash never came to the C16/+4 in a official sense, but Mastertronic filled the gap with a passable clone in 16KB in the form of The Return Of Rockman.
Notable because Doug Turner went on to release The Exploits Of Fingers Malone via Mastertronic, which was an excellent puzzle-platformer that blended elements of Lode Runner with Pac Man and logical puzzles. It was so good, my Mum would play it obsessively and she finished it before I did. My Mum also got deep into Manic Miner btw.
Timeslip, a unique side-scrolling shooter where you swap between three timelines featuring three vehicle types, was written by Jon Williams. He was more famous for the Berks series of games on the platform, all of which I thought were shit. Buying the trilogy compilation was one of the biggest disappointments in my purchasing history, just pipped by buying the Hulk Questprobe adventure based on C64 screenshots on the back, only to find it was text-only.
Amusingly, the 6502 implementation in the C16 and Plus/4 is clocked at 1.76MHz, nearly double that of the PAL Commodore 64. The upshot being Mercenary ran smoother and faster on the Plus/4 than its bigger brother, so shit like Elite or Starglider, or possibly even Driller and Total Eclipse, would have been superior on the lesser-specced machine.
A genuine unsung hero of the 8-bit era, Shaun Southern would find greater acclaim and praise in the 16-bit heyday of Supercars and Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge.
A glorious miniature Commodore 1541 disk drive that held an SD card with literally every C16/+4 game on it. Wonderful.