We spoke with Jesper Juul about his latest book, Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer.
Jesper Juul is a Danish video game theorist, designer and author who has been a respected voice within the field of video game studies for many years. He’s also written a number of books, and his latest book was published by MIT Press in December.
The book is called Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer, and deals in part with a subject we’ve been talking about many times here at Spillhistorie.no: The Commodore 64 was for a long time the world’s best-selling home computer ever, and the platform that had by far the most commercial game releases. A lot of today’s major genres first took shape on this platform, and a lot of the most important game developers got their start there. It was a hugely influential platform. Yet it’s hard to find anyone in the international (English-language) games press, or even game researchers, who treat it as anything but a footnote in the history of video games. Why is that?