The Making of Ghostbusters on the Commodore 64

Next Generation recently began running content from the respected British gaming magazine Edge, and today they're sharing The Making of Ghostbusters. The article is a look back to a barely-remembered but (for the time) forward thinking movie tie-in for the Commodore 64. Instead of a lame 'action' title following the movie's plot line, the game was set in the world of the Ghostbusters, and allowed players to build a financial empire through ghostbusting. "Crucially, for a game with so many parts - driving, simple resource management, shooting and trapping ghosts - the pieces snapped together well, and the money-making, business-upgrading elements gave the game a lasting replayability. Activision's Ghostbusters is polished, intelligently-paced, and suggests a measured and meticulous development approach: something which wasn't the case at all. 'A typical C64 game took nine months from start to finish,' laughs David Crane, the game's designer. 'Ghostbusters took six weeks!' Crane is one of the most prolific developers of the early videogame era. Creating titles such as Little Computer People and Pitfall made him Activision's star programmer."

Youtube video

[Lazerf4rt]

Here's a Youtube video [youtube.com] for anyone who wants to relive old memories. :-)

Re:First game I used a cheat code on

[antime]

This particular code really made the game unwinnable. Dunno if it was a bug or by design, but the code gave you $1000000 but you could not earn more than $999999 and therefore you couldn't repay your loan and automatically lost. I was rather young back then and played a pirated copy without instructions, but it still took me an incredibly long time to realize this. After switching to another code I at least got to the tower, but I still never managed to complete the game.

Re:Youtube video

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd rather relive them less vicariously, grab an emulator for your OS and then check this out:

http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=3133&d=18&h= 0 [gamebase64.com]