I do think software piracy also was a large success factor. When I was 13 there was one major spot in my city where consoles and computers were sold (within a department store!), and people where “swapping” games even before they bought the hardware. I remember at least one of the store clerks having a small side business providing access to disks and tapes you could copy - right on the machines that were shown in store.

And I learned how to copy the C64’s basic rom to ram and mod small things even before I had the machine myself.

All the kids were gathering round the computers, the consoles were less attractive.

When I got my own C64 in 1983, my first game was Fort Apocalypse. It was not an original. You needed a boom box with dual tape decks to copy these.

Oh my beloved C64! I made my first “real” games with it, my buddies were artistic and made the music, sprites, animations, etc. I programmed the tools to make them!

The worst aspect of the C64 was that the hardware was a mostly undocumented mystery zone. As an early teen, I had the C64 programmer’s reference manual checked out of our library for 2 years!!! Doing any kind of advanced graphics meat PEEKing and POKEing random addresses and registers and interrupts to see what would happen. A nightmare! My hat’s off to all the demo scene folks that did ludicrous stuff

edit: My first released game was “Studmaster” replete with every horrible thing your mind is currently imaging lmao. I’m not proud of this now but it was pretty wild for two 14 year old kids in the 80’s to make a small-scale text/graphic adventure game and publish it

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