Geography on the C64

Last week, my father-in-law and myself launched a new initiative: Best Self Drive Routes. The goal is to bring together the best self drive routes in the world under one umbrella and provide in-depth information on the places of interest, history etc. that you’ll run across when driving the route.

When the site went up, it got me wondering if there ever was something like a route planner or maps-of-the-world program for the Commodore 64 (or Amiga for that matter).

I couldn’t really think of any, except for the “Topo” series (or Maps 64 as they were also known as) on the C64, developed by RadarSoft in the 80s.

These programs, tested your geographical knowledge of Europe, the US and several individual countries by putting you in control of a small helicopter that had to fly from one destination to the other on a “blank” map. If you were close enough to your destination (i.e. a city) the destination would show up as a big red dot. All that remained was then to fly over the dot, gaze at your score (the faster you reached your destination, the higher the rewards) and wait for the next challenge.

I remember playing this game many times and it sure did notch up my knowledge of the world’s geography. It’s still very much playable today, except that the world in the 21st century does look quite different (and I’m not talking pixels here).

If you know of some other geography games or actual maps/route planners for the Commodore, let me know!