Spare Change (Commodore 64)

1983 was a big year for Broderbund with 8 releases. Spare Change was probably one of the more obscure titles but it is of the same high quality as most of their other games. These games were not always graphically sophisticated (which is true in the case of Spare Change) but they were still well done in their simplicity.

The point of Spare Change is to stop thieving robots from robbing tokens from some sort of arcade. You accomplish this by using some tokens in the various amusements (e.g. a jukebox) to distract the robots. Then you can rescue the tokens they are attempting to steal. The more tokens you save, the more you have in the following level to use. Simple but addictive gameplay.

Spare Change was released for Apple II, Atari 400/800 and Commodore 64. I'm not 100% sure but during this time period Synapse generally developed games for the Atari first so Spare Change was likely developed for the Atari 400/800 and then ported to other systems. The above screen shots are from the Commodore 64 version.