Mind Control

Mastertronic was the British company that rewrote the economics of the home computer market in the mid-eighties with one simple move: selling games at a fraction of the standard price. Mind Control, released for the Commodore 64 in 1984, comes from that budget line and serves as a fair sample of what those releases were like.

The budget model imposed firm development rules. A game was usually built by one person or a pair, had to be finished in weeks, and needed to fit on a single tape with no loading between stages. The result was a run of top-down arcade titles with a simple objective and a steepening difficulty curve, because with no room for scope, difficulty was the only thing left to extend playtime.

The Commodore 64 accommodated that nicely. Hardware sprites and scrolling produced decent movement without heroic programming, the sound chip could carry a catchy tune, and the palette let even plain graphics stay readable. A number of now-respected developers took their first paid work on budget titles like this one.

What stands out today is the commercial model. Cheap games widened the audience to players who could not afford full-price releases and shifted the market in ways the major publishers underestimated at first.

On OldGame.cz Mind Control runs straight in your browser. Expect a short, uncompromising arcade game rather than one that guides you, since instructions in this corner of the market amounted to a few lines on the cassette inlay.