5 The Eternal Commodore 64 Style

If Lemmings was made to prove that the C64 could, sort of, keep up with the Amiga, the 2021 PETSCII Lemmings (figure 5.1) is a deliberately simplistic C64 port of the already anachronistic Commodore PET port of the 1991 Amiga game Lemmings. The C64 version does not even use the C64 color features. Why forsake all the technical knowledge and tricks developed over four decades and go back to this? The default PETSCII character set (figure 0.14) is now interesting because it fell out of favor in professional games around 1984. After the C64 as a universal computer, as a game machine, as a machine for exploiting unknown hardware glitches, and as a machine that keeps up with newer platforms, this latest imaginary rethinks the C64 as something entirely new: a historical machine whose quirks and limitations are not to be hidden or worked around—they are now a cause for celebration.