Apollo 18 (Accolade) complete - C64 Longplay

[@NeilRoy]

I loved this game. The fact that it had digitized voices on it was amazing when you consider how much RAM the C64 had!

[@speedbird737]

try kennedy approach on the C64 - fantastic voice digitisation

[@AudieHolland]

It read each voice sample from disk so that is why it was a floppy disk-only game. If there was a casette version later it wouldn't have the voice samples I guess.

[@wcyber]

​@@AudieHollandvoice on c64 was realised using audio chip bug.. later c64 versions couldnt do it.. there were no voice samples actually as in todays formats

[@Bacho_Grande]

My childhood friends would gather round and take different 'roles' to play this game. One on the F-keys & another on the joystick. Some were better at EVAs, burns, or moon walks, and for whatever reason I did well at keeping the re-entry ball centered. It was a great unintended co-op experience and I wonder if anyone else did the same! Plus it helped my love of space, flight, and... checklists.

[@760bigbird]

Every single sound on this game is absolutely perfect!

[@RiccardoAlvalvilolvex]

They reached the moon with 8-bit computers onboard

[@presterjohn7789]

I spent so many hours on this game utterly clueless about what I was doing. That makes it a good game. Interesting to see how much more there was to it.

[@simongarrettmusic]

truly amazing what they squeezed out of the '64'

[@RiefWestCoast]

Watching and listening to this has instantly transported me back to my childhood in the 1980s! This is so great! Gosh, I loved this game as a kid! I was terrible at it, but loved playing it nonetheless! Just bought a C64 mini computer and am looking forward to adding this, in addition to many other games! It's going to be a fun summer!

[@mollari2261]

So fitting to have found this in the 50th year since Apollo 11. What a great game.

[@martinwells5747]

Pretty impressive for the c64. Shame i missed this at the time.

[@wcyber]

many good simulation games.. train, power at sea..

[@MyNameIsBucket]

One of the few cases where the C64's crackly, distorted digitized sound was suited for the game.

[@NeilRoy]

+MyNameIsBucket It was amazing the amount of speech they had consider the RAM available.

[@AudieHolland]

@@NeilRoy It was a floppy disk-only game. If there ever was a cassette version, it wouldn't have all the speech, only one or two lines.

[@wcyber]

​@@NeilRoyspeech was done in very special way by utilising sound chip bug.. not actual audio samples

[@pulykamell]

Oh, didn't notice the Vimeo link. Thanks. I sometimes wonder how we had the patience and tenacity to play all those classic games where you had no save states and one to three chances of getting it right before having to start all over. That'll be the "back in my day, we had to walk five miles to school uphill both ways"-type story to my kids.

[@lurkerrekrul]

Most of my games were cracked and without instructions too. I figured out most games, but there were a few that having the instructions really helped!

[@JeremyLevi]

I played the crap out of this as a kid. It took forever to get the hang of it. Even once I got somewhat good at it usually either the space walk or the landing would do me in. Out of all the times I played it I probably only stuck the landing half a dozen times.

[@syntaxerror3669]

Whats funny C64 got similiar computing power, as computers flying into space that times :)

[@summer20105707]

Thats one small step for a man. One giant leap for mankind.

[@IsaacKuo]

Now THIS is a true retro game. By 1987, Apollo had been retired for over a decade and replaced with the Space Shuttle system. So, the theme of this game was retro at the time it was made and published.

[@Zoomer30]

The artwork for the turnaround to dock was clearly a Gemini capsule. I noticed that error back then.

[@JasonStevens]

Apollo 18 was a super frustrating game! But once you stopped paying attention to the animations and watched the lines and status updates it was actually a pretty simple game. I'd read that it was allegedly programmed in FORTRAN of all things... But I'm pretty sure it's just 6502 asm.

[@flexmaen]

It always was tricky to figure out when some game needed the keyboard (like the space key here). The full video on vimeo takes about 24 minutes, but if you have a good run and manage to play all the game, these games were surprisingly short. However it took you enough time to manage to get through the game since you couldn't use save positions like in an emulator. :)

[@lelandfranklin3487]

Wow! Thanks! Never was good at this gamr, but liked it.

[@alitlweird]

I played countless hours of this game and yet, hardly any of this is familiar to me. Weird.

[@Nightshft42]

A really great retroperspective! I played it as a teenager a few times and remember faintly many of the scenes until the landing. But only because it was cracked, so you could proceed doing it right or not. Using the uncracked game most people didnt manage to take off. No wonder, you'd need to practise for hours and read a fat manual. Games often were harder back then and this is one of the hardest =)

[@Notllamalord]

this walked so ksp could run

[@AudieHolland]

This was a game with great sound and graphics for its time, but only OK gameplay. The Commodore 64 games I played the most in those times were: Gunship, Project Stealth Fighter and Sid Meier's Pirates. These all had OK graphics and sound but great gameplay.

[@flexmaen]

Same here. :) It's quite tricky to figure out some games without manual, especially when there was no internet. For Apollo 18 I got the manual at Project64. Also there is a site called "Bombjack" that collects manuals too.

[@ChrisCamaro]

The outstanding accomplishments of this piece of software, especially given the limited hardware it was running on, are rivaled only by the utter disappointment that nothing today comes as close to simulating an entire moon mission from start to finish as this just did. Actually there was "Apollo 18: The Moon Missions" in the 90s but after that... nothing. If they can make a deer simulator and a janitor simulator why can't they make a proper moon mission simulator damnit!

[@Zoomer30]

The one big error see is the image they show as the command/service module turn around to dock with the 3rd stage/LEM. Your in an Apollo spacecraft but it clearly looks like a Gemini in the game.

[@aldoskyz8]

one of first real simulations on c-64 + a lot of gameplay! and sure.. READ THE INSTRUCTIONS!

[@pulykamell]

Oh, I did forget about the satellite part. That was kinda tricky. I actually don't think I would have enjoyed this game as much if I knew exactly what to do. I didn't realize how short this game was until I watched this video.

[@wcyber]

yes, for me most exciting part of playing games was disxovering stuff

[@Setebos]

I was never able to make it to the Surveyor and back.

[@Robloxguy16]

Got to see the freaky ass spider?

[@reminder_cor]

Ohhj first time i see this game looks pretty amazing

[@speedbird737]

what happened to MAX Q lol

[@lurkerrekrul]

I agree that you needed a copy of the manual, or at least an explanation of what to do in each part, but it wasn't THAT hard. Once I knew how to play it, I could usually complete all the various sections each time I played.

[@pulykamell]

I didn't think this one was too bad. It was mostly just a timing game, and there's only so many things that move around on screen that you can control (and, as far as I remember, no keys were really used in the game, or at least nothing important.) I remember the moonwalk part taking a little while to get right, so it was annoying having to play and replay all the time to get to that part and figure out exactly what to do. The ones that were a bitch were the games with lots of keyboard strokes.

[@donjorge8329]

Hammerteil!

[@pulykamell]

I don't think you needed a manual. I had a cracked copy, too, and, through trial and error (a lot of it), was able to figure out what to do. Part of the fun was figuring out what to do. That said, Almost every single game I had as a kid was cracked, so I was used to figuring it out. The flight simulators like F-19 Stealth Fighter were always the ones that were a bitch to figure out.

[@youuuuuuuuuuutube]

The first thing is like "okay how do I start the engine? Let's push every key until something happens"

[@summer20105707]

Great simulator.

[@MCHammurabi]

It was actually on a double sided floppy as I recall. I miss this game!

[@daskraut]

holy booster, jeb kerman's grandpa!

[@leoshork]

daskraut Lol, I had never heard “holy booster” 😂

[@Zoomer30]

Accolade games were very good, UNLESS you had the Enhancer 2000 floppy disc drive. The official Commodore 6020 (not sure if that's right) floppy drive was quite expensive. So I got an Enhancer 2000 at Target (first game I payed was Halleys Project.) Saved up lawn mowing cash for 6 months. The issue was that Accolade games would not run (sometimes), or would crash during disc accesses. Another game that I had issues with was Impossible Mission. I got this game for XMAS and once again it was an issue. In desperation, I turned the drive upside down and, wahla, it worked! So there was a workaround.

[@pulykamell]

I had an Enhancer 2000 as well, and many games didn't work on it. The cracked games, oddly enough, almost always did, but buying an official game was a roll of the dice. It would have issues with certain fastloaders (though it thankfully worked with the ubiquitous "Quickload" or "QL" on cracked disk games) and I believe with some copy protection schemes. Most EA games didn't seem to like it, and Activision games were finicky, too. It had to do with the ROM in it. They couldn't just copy Commodore's 1541 disk ROM, and their version wasn't fully compatible.

[@TTOTheTrueOne]

I had this game as a kid. Could not get past the launching phase ;) But I like the unique concept of the game and it looks very nice.

[@Simcore999]

👍