Commodore 64 Arcade Multiversion : SPECIAL 

I visited John Tweedy when he was in the middle of programming Ikari Warriors ..

I had no idea there were so many multi-country releases of these games! :)

Love these type of videos, hope you're considering doing a follow up. Space Harrier was slaughtered in the magazines but for me it was a fantastic coding achievement by Chris Butler. Chris had to program a game which had dedicated chips onto a 64. I prefer the US version though I did buy the original in the UK. I had so many fond memories that particular Christmas. Enjoyed that 👍

While I didn’t have Frogger, I had Road Toad.

Both Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. (not Super Mario Bros. mind you!) received two very different ports for North America and Europe but what's unusual is the timing of these version: the former region got cartridge ports in the early 80s by Atarisoft while the latter got two cassette/disk ports by Ocean in the late 80s. Apparently they don't share a single line of code. The European ports look like attempts to ride the coattail of the popularity of Super Mario Bros. which wasn't available for license, of course, hence Ocean resorted to those older games.

Great episode. I've enjoyed watching it. :) Nicely narrated and the games' versions are analyzed justly.

Long ttime without seeing a new doc from you! Continue with these, is gold! :D

Have forgotten about all these variations but thanks for the great memories and hope you make more!

Also... She's an 8-bit Lover! I didn't notice that little nod to the double Phils on my first watch.

I know you said you weren't able to cover them all. Does that mean we can expect a Part 2? You could probably just roll your Zaxxon video into the midst of Part 2. And hopefully you could also cover Donkey Kong and Congo Bongo. Flying Shark and Sky Shark. Turrican, Crystal Castles, Circus Games, Renegade. Plus the US versions of Arkanoid and Operation Wolf have 1351 mouse support, while the Euro versions don't.

This is a great video... always wanted to see and compare different versions.

This was an eye opener 😅 Thanks dude 👍🏼

Nice to see the varying regional attempts at Arcade conversions side by side, the difference in quality is at times shocking!

Very interesting and well presented video! Loved UK Ikari as a kid.

I went straight to the tandy 1000 after the atari 2600 so it was leaps and bounds ahead of the c64 in many ways.. The only memory i have of a Commodore game was an SSI AD&D game

Great video once again! 👍👍 Thanks Brendan and cheers from Germany. 😉

I'll admit I haven't really watched your channel since October as my life kinda fell apart. Watching this video, I missed how great your videos are.

I never knew there were so many variations before! In Australia we mainly had the UK versions of games.

This is cool enough even for Ace Rimmer! Btw: the Space Harrier theme was nicked from...I mean, it is an "homage" to the Blake's 7 theme tune ;)

New subscriber!! Channels awesome.

I really loved the usa version of street fighter with its small but nice graphic. It also has the special moves of Ken and ryu 😊

I think US Bionic Commando looks much better. Its so much clearer and easy to read. The character isnt distinct from the background on the UK game. They should have put a black border on the sprites so they stood out when the background and foreground use the same colours.

I love frogger

In 10 years, we will be able to ask an AI to make any game for us : The Last Ninja 4, 5, 6. Gianna Sister 2, 3... Turrican IV for any system in the style of the originals. It will be weird to have games custom made just for us with infinite number of levels, enemies... And the AI will be able to mix game genres on the fly : Space Invader mixed with Street Fighter.

the uk double dragon theme is one of my favorite sid tunes, i don't know why you consider it mediocre. it was actually the first track on a mixtape i made back then, and the first one i played on a sid-themed event i hosted a few years later. but the really lame thing about both versions is the lack of throwable objects, half the fun of the original version. i used to have a never-ending contest with my friend who owned a pc, and although the cga graphics looked like crap, it still had that one mechanic which made it that much more enjoyable

Never understood why there was US and UK versions of the same game. Was it the 50Hz PAL vs 60Hz NTSC? That UK users usually used cassette while US users used disks? Was it licensing??

What's the name of the song between 28:59 - 29:34? I keep hearing this song, but I'm never told the name of it, despite asking this question quite a few times.

Another game with two completely different versions was Congo Bongo. Like Zaxxon, there was both a cartridge and a disk version, with the disk version being vastly superior to the cartridge game. As for Space Harrier and Outrun, I've always had the opinion that both games could have been better if the programmers hadn't tried to make them single-load games for the UK/European market. Outrun in particular could have had the arcade's branching paths if they didn't have to cram the entire game in memory at once. Likewise, Space Harrier could have been more faithful to the arcade if they only had to worry about fitting one level at a time into memory. Of course I realize that making the games multiload is no guarantee that they would have been better. The Amiga versions of both were terrible, despite the Amiga being much more powerful and having a floppy drive as standard.

Space Harrier's conversion uses software sprites for enemies and obstacles - they are made up of characters, moving in "steps" towards the player (which is done with the hardware sprites). I enjoyed it but it does feel less impressive when you have seen other machines (Mega Drive, Amiga). With Rampage, I'm wondering if it's down to the C64/C64C change in the SID chip? The UK version definitely feels like it is filtering the sounds. UK tape version of Out Run had different loads with different routes. Missing out the junctions was a major failure of both versions. I preferred the US version of Street Fighter, the overlaid fighters are much better than the expanded Tiertex mess. With those Capcom USA games, it's a real shame there wasn't a UK version of The Speed Rumbler... I've included the UK version of Afterburner in my forthcoming book C64 Nightmares, looking at over 100 terrible titles. It was such a terrible effort for a well-known license. Coming soon from FUSION Retro Books...

US Ikari makes me spew up

On a side note the Double Dragon on the Amiga was also terrible but the Double Dragon II The Revenge was fantastic.

Easy lover! C64 version

I think the VIC-20 does great game sound effects! Music, not so much.

I never understood why there were different versions for us and Europe

Very enjoyable to watch! So glad I had the good version of Ikari Warriors back then. Regarding the waist gap in the Double Dragon sprites, 8-Bit Show And Tell has a long and interesting video about this: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ptsfl79QXxk.html

Donkey Kong I think too?

How about super locomotive, loco, suicide express, black thunder basically the same game all done by tony crowther