The story
The Commodore 64 Games System, usually shortened to C64GS, was a cartridge-only games console built from Commodore 64 hardware. Commodore UK championed the idea, reasoning that children who only wanted to play games would happily take a cut-down C64 if it cost less, and that such a machine could undercut Nintendo and Sega. It went on sale in Europe in December 1990 at £99, when a full C64 cost £159. It was never sold in North America.
Internally it used a C64C motherboard and was fully compatible with C64 cartridges, but the rear ports for the cassette deck, disk drive and user port were left out of the case, and there was no keyboard at all. Every console came with a four-game cartridge holding Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O'Fun, International Soccer, Flimbo's Quest and Klax.
The promised library of up to a hundred titles never appeared. Around 28 games were produced for the system, most of them ports or compilations of existing C64 releases, and only a handful were exclusive to cartridge. Ocean Software gave the most support, with games including RoboCop 2, Lemmings and Toki.
The console struggled from the start. Ordinary C64s already had cartridge slots and joystick ports, cassette games for them were far cheaper, and 1990 buyers were turning to 16-bit consoles. Of about 20,000 units built, only around 2,000 are thought to have sold. Commodore later bundled the leftover cartridges and joysticks with the C64C.