One of the things that impresses me to this day about the Commodore 64 is how much the software for it improved over years.  Well, it wasn't just the software, it was also the marketing of that software.  Simplistic text and character set graphics (graphics made from symbols printed under the tall C64 keys on the keyboard), in ziplock bags with crude drawings that looked like a Junior High school student had drawn them changed into the more polished sort of software in boxes we are used to seeing today.  While screenshots of a game indicating the quality of the graphics are a must today, in the early days a game company could get away with having only a fancy (if you were lucky) painting of a dragon in an advertisement and tantilizing promises of "exciting" gameplay.

Along with other home PC systems of the early 80's, the Commodore 64 was witness to the birth of "Personal Computer" gaming --- the so called "PC gaming" that today usually means Intel or AMD powered systems running Windows.

By comparison, console gaming systems like those from Nintendo have rarely seen the sort of technological leaps in software quality that the C64 saw over its long commercial lifespan.

One way to appreciate the differences over the years is to pick up an early C64 enthusiast magazine and compare it to one from years later.

I have scanned versions of a Compute!'s Gazette Magazine from 1983 (the first issue), and much later scans from an issue printed in 1989.

The full scans of both magazines, with all of the flavor of the advertisements that came within are hosted here.  You'll need a program like Adobe Acrobat Free Reader to view them as they are in .PDF format:

1983 Commodore 64 Magazine Scan (Compute!'s Gazette, July 1983)
1989 Commodore 64 Magazine Scan (Compute!'s Gazette, November 1989)

Here are a couple of screen grabs I took to illustrate the differences if you don't have the time to download the large, full magazine scans above:

1983:


1989:

Note the extreme difference in the quality of the graphics and the presentation of the games in the advertisements.

Again, this is one of the reasons I still love the Commodore 64 -- by taking a trip through the software library or even old magazines you can see the progress and improvement unfold.  And  you can really appreciate the way programmers challenged themselves to squeeze every last bit of power out of an aging system with very limited specs.

It's something that often is missing in today's overly hardware-dependent advances in gaming.