BC's Quest for Tires

You play as Thor, a caveman riding a unicycle, racing across a prehistoric landscape to rescue Cute Chick from a hungry dinosaur. The gameplay is a continuous side-scrolling obstacle course: rocks to jump over, trees to duck under, gorges and swimming pools to clear at speed. Timing is everything. Jump too early, and you crash; hesitate at a gorge, and momentum abandons you. Speed can be increased or decreased on the fly, and some obstacles actually require a higher velocity to clear. A standout sequence involves Fat Broad swinging her club at turtles submerging in water, which you must use as stepping stones with careful timing.

The graphics are primitive even by 1983 standards, but the art style matches the comic strip's scratchy, deadpan humor. Thor glancing back at you with a scowl before tumbling over a rock is funnier than a polished animation would be.

There is no music; only sparse sound effects. The whole thing can be completed in under ten minutes by anyone who has learned its rhythms. When it ends, it simply starts again. It's a very simple game. But when I played it on my friend's Commodore 64 for the first time (when I had only a VIC-20), it looked like an amazing game. It may well have been the first C64 game many players ever touched — that moment of sitting next to someone on a bedroom floor, passing the joystick back and forth, trying to clear the gorge just one more time. Games do not need to be complex to leave a mark. Sometimes ten minutes on a unicycle is all it takes.