What was evil about that one was that it erased your character when you loaded it, so you couldn’t just shut the computer off when you died…you were dead for good!
That was the code I pretty much used on every disk I ever put in… I’m confused as to your point?
The load command was not an attempt at copy protection. To break it down the Commodore Basic command (from memory):
LOAD - Access the file from a device.
“*” - First file in the data structure. You could also put a specific file name in to load something else from the disk. “$” was used to access the directory of the disk in ASCII format.
,8 - The device number. The C64 could have multiple drives so you could also load from 9, 10, or 11. IIRC, the printer was device 5 and the cassette port was device 0.
,1 - If the file is an autorunning binary then this will execute it when it completes loading.
I played some game- I forget the name, but it had you going from one scenario to the next- if you passed of course. It was sort of leaping things etc. What I will never forget was the annoying sound track- The Lair of The Mountain King.
What was the game where you’re sort of jousting, but there is a ball bouncing around, and your little knight character seemed to be tethered to the wall with an elastic cord?
Summer Olympics
Racing Destruction Set (panamajack, you’re not the first person I’ve heard call for a remake)
The Three Stooges
Maniac Mansion
Hitchhiker’s Guide
Zork
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Silent Service
Space Station Construction Kit (I played this one until one day I had my shuttle leave orbit with an astronaut still in the middle of an EVA. He died. This wasn’t long after the Challenger accident and I felt really guilty. I never played the game again.)
and a great one that I typed in from RUN magazine called Crossroads. It was a bit like Pac Man, with tight little mazes and monsters chasing you and ‘power pill’ thingys to grab. But also like Berzerk - your player is a little dude walking around shooting at the monsters. There were like 9 or 10 different kinds of monsters each with different behaviors. Some of them would fight each other, and you could use that to your advantage. Some of them had rubber in the backs of their heads so if they’re facing away from you, your bullets would bounce right back to you. For a magazine type-in, it was a surprisingly well balanced, challenging and fun game.
Crossroads, and it was Compute!'s Gazette, not RUN.
It’s possible you’re joking, but if not, it’s a bit like saying double-clicking “setup.exe” is a hack that installs almost any Windows program.
Good god! That looks like something that would have me rocking in a fetal position in the corner five minutes in…
I’m almost 100% certain Super Mario Brothers was never officially released for the C64. You sure it wasn’t a hack of this game?
I believe the cassette port was device 1.The printer was device 4 (on the serial bus). The keyboard was device 0. Device 2 was RS-232 and Device 3 was the CRT.
I kept getting basic sponsorship from the gladiasaurus league.
I was so proud of myself when I learned how to hack a simple copy-protection scheme. I knew C64 Basic already but I had to teach myself Commodore assembly code to figure it out. The load routine looked for a deliberate but harmless flaw on the floppy, and aborted if it wasn’t found. Tweaking two bytes eliminated that.
Insert joke about size of joystick here. 
One non-game that was very frustrating was a cartridge based word processing program, with which I attempted to write a chapter of a book. Combining a buggy program, the old C64 40 character line, and a crappy printer did not make for a good experience. I eventually just gave up and retyped everything either at work with Bell Labs MM or on a PC I eventually got.
No, I’m 100% positive it was Super Mario Bros. I ordered it from a magazine though so I’m not sure that it was an official release. I wish I would have hung on to it now. But the good news is that I’ve still got a box full of Compute! Gazette magazines from the 80s, not to mention, a working C64 and hundreds of floppy disks. Maybe I’ll hook it back up tonight.
Amazon, with a parrot sidekick who would chide you when you cursed. Cursing was so much fun in those text adventure games. Or you’d do something totally impossible and the game would reply, “Don’t be silly!”
I began my programming career on a PET 2001, with the built-in cassette deck and the “chicklet” keyboard. My brother and I wrote hand-assembled 6502 code on the VIC-20 for software for which we were really well paid. The Commodore 64 was a dream machine when it came out – hardware sprites, programmable ADSR sound, and a full 64K of RAM (if you flipped the pesky operating system and BASIC ROMs out of the way).
If you ever played a game called Frog Hunter, with its strange, yet somehow listenable original music, that was written by my brother and me. (Well, the music was actually the result of bug tromping through our data and creating the score that we left in the game.) We also created a game called Fortune, an early ASCII dungeon game based loosely on an arcade game we saw once in Detroit. It was originally for the PET, but was ported to the C64 later (the VIC-20 was too limited to run it).
The only “game” that I routinely played on the C64 was Rogue, but that was via loading a VT52 emulator and dialing into a Unix box at the University of Toronto.
I’d made the jump to the IBM PC by late '83, so I missed the C128. A shame that that machine didn’t take off, since it was in many ways more advanced than the PC at the time (with a native CP/M mode, as well!).
I almost forgot! The software that I used most that took the longest to load was Punter BBS software. I ran a user group for sysops, and we had our own BBS that ran on my C64 with a borrowed IEEE-488 cartridge and 8050 drive. We had a killer 1200 baud Hayes modem, a huge step up from the 300 baud Commodore modem I’d had to write dialing programs for.
Um, sorry to inject so much non-game stuff into the thread. I was overcome with nostalgia. 
Oh man I forgot about that game! I think I had it for the Apple IIe.
So how long did it take to load?
(And I had the crapy 300 baud modem. I used to dialup to local BBSs and try to chat, but people with C128 would type fast and it would scroll past so fast I couldn’t read it.)