Slaterman

Slaterman is a Commodore 64 platformer from 1994. No author or publisher is documented for it, which is hardly unusual for a C64 release from that decade — commercial publishing for the machine was fading out and most new games came from the scene instead.

The year matters here. The Commodore 64 had been on sale since 1982 and by 1994 was long past its commercial peak: shops sold PCs and sixteen-bit consoles, and Commodore itself folded that year. Games kept appearing anyway, because a community of programmers, musicians and artists had stayed with the machine and could pull more out of it than most professionals managed in the eighties.

Platformers were among the most common genres on the C64, and late-era examples tend to show real craft — smooth scrolling, clean collision detection and music written for the SID chip. Sound is usually the first thing that catches attention in a late C64 game today.

Without further data there is no point inventing a story or a level count. The genre, the platform and the year are established, and the year alone places this among the machine's late works.

The C64 scene had its own distribution habits. Games travelled on floppies through the post, at meetings, and later over bulletin boards and the internet, usually free or for the price of the disk. Authors signed their work with handles, which is why plenty of titles have no traceable developer name today even when the game itself survives in perfect condition.

You can try this one immediately on OldGame.cz — the emulator runs it inside your browser window.