“GameBase 64 is only a database,” its game-information collector, Alessio Viti, told Retro Gamer in 2004. “I mean it’s a legitimate attempt to document all Commodore 64 gameware before it’s too late.” That database is enormous. By 2004 the GameBase64 collection listed more than 16,000 Commodore 64 games, each with its publisher, year, programmer, musician and genre, and often its screenshots, instructions and magazine reviews. A companion Windows program, the GameBase front end, lets a user browse the list and start any game in an emulator with a click. Retro Gamer put GameBase 64 on its cover disc.
Two projects that met
The front end came first. James Burrows, known as Bu22, wrote a Windows front end for the C64 emulators C64S and VICE and called it GameBase64. He shipped it with a database of his own and a note in its help file: “Maybe in the future, someone else might take this database and create a more complete and accurate one.”
Someone did. On 13 May 1998 Michael Plate, a C64 fan who had been away from the machine for ten years, started “the quest to build the ultimate C64 games collection ever”, and used Burrows’s program to keep track of it. He wrote to Burrows that month. “By April 1999 he’d professed his love for me because I’d shared information regarding 7,000 titles with him,” Plate told Retro Gamer. The team started calling him the Borg for the way he assimilated games into the collection.
Five years to a release
The collection grew quickly. In August 2000 GO64! reported that the “Gamebase Collection” team had published a text list of 10,826 games; by then, Plate said, it had passed 10,000. After two more years the team converted the database to a new format with room for extras, and it held some 15,000 entries.
Release was another matter. Plate admitted he was a perfectionist who kept improving the collection on his own hard disk until “the team had to convince me to make it public”. Announced release dates came and went, and members dropped out. In March 2002 a caption in ZZAP!64’s revival issue asked, “Great idea, guys — but is it finished yet?” Burrows turned his program into a general-purpose front end called GameBase, which Lotek64 found still in beta that August, able through scripts to run emulators for computers other than the C64. The first significant release of the collection came in September 2003. “It was hilarious when we jokingly announced that the whole thing was a hoax just a few days before we actually released it,” Burrows recalled.
How it works
The collection is a database; the front end is a separate program that reads it. The front end shows each game’s details, screenshots and extras, such as the game’s SID music, scanned manuals, magazine reviews, MP3 remixes and links. To start a game it runs a script written in GEMUS (GameBase EMUlator Script), a small scripting language that hands the game to whichever emulator the user has chosen. Retro Gamer praised its “built-in future proofing”: GEMUS was built to take on new emulators as they appeared, sparing players “complicated command-line parameters”.
Because the front end is not tied to the C64, other collections were built for it. By 2012 Paul Thompson had filled it with a ready-made database of Spectrum titles, Gamebase ZX, which could link to inlay scans and instruction files, according to Colin Woodcock’s The ZX Spectrum on Your PC. In 2004 Retro Gamer met the team behind a planned GameBase for the Atari ST at an Atari show.
Missing games
Much of the team’s work was finding games nobody had preserved. Retro Gamer described fans “scouring garages, attics and car boot sales in search of the rare games that still evade capture”. Nathan Butcher typed in listings from old magazines, trying optical character recognition first and then typing them “the old-fashioned way” on his own C64. The team’s most-wanted game in 2004 was Hi-Tec’s Daffy Duck, which had been reviewed in a magazine but, as Retro Gamer told it, vanished when the publisher ran into debt before the game could be fully distributed.
A database, or an archive?
What exactly GameBase64 distributes has been described in different ways. In 2002 ZZAP!64 described the project as one that “aims to collect every C64 game ever made and make them all available for download”. In 2004 Viti drew a line between the collection and other emulation projects: “To document software is absolutely legal. The collection does not include a single Commodore 64 game.” The project’s co-web developer, Steve Feurer, said that as old machines stop being commercially viable, “the problems tend to lessen and will do so even more with time.”
Later versions
GameBase64 is still maintained, and Plate still posts its news. Version 17 of the collection, in April 2021, had 28,500 entries. Version 18 followed in April 2022 with 29,000, in what the site called its 25th year. The team planned to release version 19, with 30,000 entries, on 4 July 2023, but its webmaster, Steven Feurer, died suddenly. With outside help the team regained access to gb64.com, moved it to a new server and released version 19 on 20 October 2023, dedicated to him.
Jan Harries of the High Voltage SID Collection credited people “like those behind the Gamebase64” with preserving the software that made much of the SID music collection possible. A 2012 Retro Gamer book on the C64 named Gamebase64 as one of the groups working to “document and preserve all games ever released”.
Sources
- Craig Vaughan, “GB64”, profile, Retro Gamer issue 5, 2004: the team (Michael Plate, James Burrows, Demetrius Kiminas, Martin Pugh, Nathan Butcher, John Charroux, Alessio Viti, Steve Feurer), the collection’s growth to more than 16,000 games, GEMUS, the September 2003 release, the hunt for Daffy Duck, and the team’s views on legality. The same issue’s cover disc carried GameBase 64.
- Retro Gamer issue 6, 2004: the GameBase ST project at an Atari show.
- GO64!, August 2000, news: “Gamebase Collection” list of 10,826 games.
- ZZAP!64 issue 107, March 2002: the Gamebase64 website, and (p. 34) Demetrius Kiminas as a member of a project that “aims to collect every C64 game ever made and make them all available for download”.
- Lotek64 issue 2, August 2002 (in German): GameBase as the successor of GameBase64, in beta, with more than 15,000 programs.
- SIDin issue 6, 8 May 2004: Jan Harries on Gamebase64 and the HVSC.
- Colin Woodcock, The ZX Spectrum on Your PC, second edition (2012), p. 60: Gamebase ZX.
- Retro Gamer: The Commodore 64 Book (2012): Gamebase64 among groups preserving C64 games.
- GB64.com (web, secondary): “The GB64 Team” (Burrows and Plate on the project’s start and release), and news posts of 25 April 2021, 14 April 2022, 20 September 2023, 6 October 2023 and 20 October 2023. https://www.gb64.com/