The Commodore 64 Star Blazers Video Game That Never Was

Long ago, when this ancient anime fan was not quite so ancient, two epochal events happened at nearly the same time, both crucial to the growth of a young nerd. He got a new Commodore 64 home computer, and he saw "Star Blazers", the English dub for American TV of the Japanese anime "Space Battleship Yamato". For a time these concepts fused into a burning ambition: to program a Star Blazers game! Grand ideas were planned for raiding enemy fuel bases along the way, SPRITE-powered space battles, and so on.

As time wore on, though, the passion to build the whole edifice gradually waned, and the Commodore was superseded by my superior computers and game platforms, and the childhood project was stored on a 5.25" floppy disk in a plastic case on a shelf.

But what with the growing revival of Yamato fandom in 2010 and beyond, and with the new Yamato 2199 anime poised to (hopefully) attract a new generation of fans to this classic anime story, and what with the availability of some very good C64 emulators for the Mac (Power64), it seemed an opportune time to engage in a little nostalgia for the 8-bit days of yore, which "made a generation...that could code, a bubble before proper consoles, who all know..." that there's no game quite like one that you make yourself!

Presented here are the title screens and some of the planned "sprites" (small, smoothly moving 2-d bitmaps) for the would-be game, with the background music being the C64 Sound Interface Device (SID) chip playing the Yamato title theme (which I programmed after obtaining the melody's sheet music in the "Arrivederci Yamato" Roman Album at a Creation Convention in the early 80s, and a program guide giving correspondences between the basic musical tones and SID codes on the C64).

(hat tips to: Roland Lieger, author of Power64; Rob Manuel & MJ HIbbett of B3TA for the "Hey Hey 16K" video from which the quote about proper consoles was stolen, and of course the entire creative staff of "Space Battleship Yamato", but especially Hiroshi Miyagawa, whose amazing theme song I butchered with this tinny SID chip interpretation!)

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Star Blazers
• video game

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