Playing Merry Christmas by Melbourne House on the hottest day of the year
Old computer games aren't just fun: they let you revisit A Time Before. As long as you stay a while, not forever, that can be really precious.
Whenever I’m a bit sad I pick up an old computer magazine and let it take me down a retro hole. This week, my super-rando-mag-selector stopped on the December 1984 edition of C&VG. It was hot as desert balls outside. A British Christmas sounded good to me.
It’s one of those fat festive issues that ran all the way up to December 16th. You’d never forget this one if you shelled out 95p for it. It’s a 200+ page bad boy that’d be forever mashed up in that bit of your brain that also files away the orange carpet at WH Smith and how smoky the bus was on the way home. C&VG 38 is full of the best bits of 1984, and what a fucking year. Here’s a salivating preview of David Crane’s Ghostbusters, cutely unaware of the phenomenon that the franchise is about to be. And look! Here’s Ant Attack, one of the first games to let you choose a gender. “Get your rocks off”, says this ad for Boulderdash (nine quid from StateSoft in, er, Stevenage). Over the page again you can win £25k for finishing Ian Livingstone’s Eureka (the guy who pocketed the cash was so good at games he got offered a job with Domark).
But page 146 is where I found my thing. The place I was going to disappear for the afternoon. Melbourne House had written a Christmas game for the Commodore 64. It was 95p. You sent off a coupon by the end of November and prayed that the cassette would arrive in time (please, no cash in the mail). It looked shit and brilliant and it was easy to find.
Merry Christmas is a text adventure with pretty, demo scene-ish animated bits and some Jingle Bells. “It was slapped together using bits from our other games in a matter of weeks, including some Exploding Fist sprite multiplexor code for Santa” remembers Dave Johnston, who worked on the game’s graphics.
Ah yes, Santa. You – you’re you in this game - start Merry Christmas hopelessly lost at the North Pole in search of the big man’s workshop. Using the keyboard you type stuff like DIG IN SNOW. You’ll find a carrot. Give it to the snowman you meet on a later screen and he’ll point you in the direction of a key, which’ll unlock a door. You know how this works.
Once you’re inside the workshop you’ll unearth a book, which is probably the real reason for the game’s existence. Look at it. It’s a catalogue of other Melbourne House games you can play. It has no use in the game. Make sure to buy ‘em all, kids!
When you put the book down, you’ll find some letters to Santa and a bunch of presents knocking about. There’s also a sleigh nearby. You can probably suss your task from here.
So what’s it like to play? Well, it’s as shit/brilliant as I’d expected. The game’s parser – that bit which understands what you’re trying to say – is limited, and it doesn’t recognise basic phrases like PICK UP (you’ve gotta use GET). You’ll be frustrated in the later stages, too, when it becomes apparent that you’ve got to pick up (GET!) objects that aren’t mentioned in the text. It’s down to your imagination or interpretation of the graphics to muddle through (this is a recurring theme in Melbourne House’s texty outings: in Sherlock, you’d get stuck unless you knew to “hail the handsome cab”).
But this game has become a Christmas Eve tradition for some hardened old timers, and it’s easy to forgive its annoyances and see why. It’s charming. Reindeer fly across a snowy sky, Santa waddles like he’s got Exploding Fist innards and the book you find in Santa’s workshop has KEEPING UP WITH COMMODORE written on it. That sentence pulled me right back to a place and time, reheating stuff in my soul that I’d long forgotten: the Christmas that Santa brought me Turbocharge and I played it up in our freezing attic for so long my hands went blue. The festive issues of the magazines I loved, like issue 16 of Commodore Format with the Creatures 2 snowy interlude demo. The thrill of seeing that C64 screen illuminating my childhood bedroom for the very first time, and the happy – if confused – look that my Dad gave me for loving this computer so very much.
And those moments are why I really go down retro holes. I love old computer games, but it’s more than that. In a world of mortgages, running the kids to school and endless deadlines it’s nice to go back to a place with no alarms and no surprises. Stay a while, not forever, and you’re good to go at life again.
Hours later, I surfaced back into my forty-something world and the blistering summer. The sun was starting to go down. The kids wanted me to play on the Switch. My wife asked if she should wear the dress with the fox or the squirrel pattern at the beach tomorrow. On WhatsApp, my mate was taking the piss out of my favourite football team. I felt present, full of gratitude and no longer sad. Merry Christmas!🎅
Here’s the issue of C&VG. The game blurb is on page 146. And here’s a place to play Merry Christmas in your browser. It’s also a .D64 on all the usual C64 game download sites. If you get stuck, I’ve put my solution below. Er, I think it works!
Merry Christmas by Melbourne House for the Commodore 64 - the complete solution
This solution works around some of the bugs in the game, and should let you finish it. From the first screen:
S, E, DIG, GET NOSE, N, GIVE NOSE TO SNOWMAN, READ SIGN, DIG, GET KEY, UNLOCK DOOR, OPEN DOOR, E, S, READ BOOK, READ LETTERS, GET SACK, GET DOLL AND PUT IT IN SACK, GET BEAR AND PUT IT IN SACK, GET DOLLHOUSE AND PUT IT IN SACK, GET BAT AND PUT IT IN SACK, GET BALL AND PUT IT IN SACK, GET CAT AND PUT IT IN SACK, N, E, GET JACKET, EXAMINE POCKET, GET WHISTLE, W, W, BLOW WHISTLE, PUT SACK IN SLEIGH, GET IN SLEIGH, FLY