PixlBit

I played this on the Atari XE. I could never win it because Stay Puft would start destroying buildings at $4000 a pop with no apparent way to stop him. I ended every game flat broke. I had no instructions since it was a bootleg copy, as almost all of my Atari XE games were. It wasn't until the Internet when I learned that using the "ghost bait" was necessary to stop Stay Puft and give you a little cash bonus on top of that.

The Ghostbusters theme playing constantly got pretty annoying too. It did have a cheesy digitized voice saying "Ghostbusters! Hahahaha!" when you booted the game up, and I read somewhere that that three second voice sample blew through a sizable chunk of the game's development budget, 

yeah I read about the voice sample on Wikipedia. Funny how it took up so much of the budget. That's just ridiculous. I can imagine the music would get annoying. It's amazing how short some of the music loops were in old games, but we didn't notice. 

I liked a lot of other complicated games on my Atari. Alternate Reality was a RPG that had realistic lighting, weather, and character health but they only finished two parts out of seven total before the company went belly up. Temple of Apshai was one of the oldest RPGs out there, but you needed the documentation to really understand it, since all the descriptions of what was going on were in the book, kind of like the DM of a tabletop RPG. But these games helped foster my interest in NES RPGs like Ultima: Exodus, Dragon Quest, and Faxanadu. 

Yeah really complicated games still have a sort of romance to me. It's why I like tactical RPG's and crazy PC games. I don't know why exactly, maybe because it's this huge world to explore. Faxanadu is awesome. 

Ok, so Commodore 64 was an 80s thing ... man, it is hard for me to keep track of the timeline of consoles that aren't one of the current major three or Sega. 

The C64 was a home computer, but it was heavy on games too, so it was marketed to kids and parents. Parents thought they were buying something educational, but kids got to play games too. I never had one because we had Apple computers and then PC's at my house. 

You know what's funny is that I remember playing Ghostbusters at a friend's house on his C64, too!

Did you know that the Ghostbusters game you're referring to was made by David Crane, the same guy who made Pitfall and A Boy and His Blob?  I've met David Crane in person twice!  Once at E3 and once at the National Videogame Museum.  Unfortunately, Ghostbusters isn't one of David Crane's better games.

I have a lot of sentiment for the Pitfall games. 

Yeah I guess going over to friends' houses to play their C64s was the thing to do! 

The games I remember playing on my friend's C64 were Ghostbusters, Ikari Warriors, Marble Madness, and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders.

I played Ikari Warriors on the NES a lot with my brother. 

I played Maniac Mansion in the late nineties when me and my roommate were collecting retro computers and consoles. 

I had an Apple IIc and only played Wizardry on it. All my friends had consoles, no pcs that I remember. It would have been cool to play a C64 back then or an Atari pc. 

I had an Apple back then too, and then we moved to PCs eventually. I always envied the kids who had C64s though. They had a lot of games. 

I never knew anyone who had one. It would've been neat if I did.