For starters, not a single picture of the real original classic C64?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
"Though the first Commodore 64 came equipped with a MOS 6410 processor that ran at about 1 MHz(...)"
It was a 6510 running at 1 Mhz, which was basically the same as the 6502 used in the Apple 2 (and later in the 8-bit Nintendo), including the exact same instruction set, the numbering difference due to a few minor hardware changes.
Worth of notice was that American C64's weren't able to run many (if not most) of European action games. C64 games programmers relied a lot on raster interrupts - system interrupts which were triggered when the electron beam that forms the TV display reached a specified line - in order to achieve effects like sprite multiplexing (allowing for more than 8 hardware sprites on-screen at the same time). The trick was to update the hardware sprite's Y position once it had already been drawn on the screen, so that it could be used again on the same video frame. At least when the C64 got to a point where its resources were being used to their full extent by game programmers, probably far beyond what the computer's original designers ever thought would be possible on it, most games were being produced by European software houses. European C64's could run better games because European TV systems work at 50 Hz, while the American NTSC-M standard works at 60 Hz. This means that there were more processor clocks available to game programmers per video frame (1/50 > 1/60), and since most everything was synched to the video frequency and almost every available processor clock was used by game routines, most action-intensive games ended up not being playable on US C64's, and when they did, they would play faster, something that had a specially negative effect on the wonderful SID tunes.
There were also the incredibly talented musicians who created some of the most beautiful game soundtracks ever: the wonderful Last Ninja soundtrack by Ben Daglish; the absolutely classic Cybernoid 1 and 2 themes by the Maniacs Of Noise and M.O.N.'s leader Jeroen Tel, respectivelly; the Hawkeye soundtrack by the Maniacs Of Noise; the Delta soundtrack by Ron Hubbard; the Wizard soundtrack and software house Ocean's cassette loader tunes by Martin Galway; Tim Follin, David Whittaker, and too many others to mention here. Thanks, guys, your music marked many people's lives forever (including mine).
Due to some of the C64's video chip features, like hardware sprites (and the later development of multiplexing and other sprite management techniques) and the ability to position the video screen within an 8-pixel horizontal offset range, the C64 was the horizontal shoot'em'up games king. Armalyte by Cyberdine Systems, Katakis/Denaris (the game had its original name changed and its release delayed for a while due to the threat of a lawsuit by R-Type publishers), X-Out, Hawkeye and the Turrican games were some of the best examples of the C64 taken to its limits. Most people never realized, though, that due to the 6510 chip being quite slow, the games backdrops were actually made up of blocks of regular text characters, redefined to display the games graphics instead of text - the video chip allowed programmers to easily point to different data tables for the text character set.
Although the C64 did feature 64 KB of RAM, only about 38 KB were available for regular use, the rest being used by the Kernel ROM, which shared the same address space as the rest of the RAM. It was possible though to switch off the ROM in order to use the RAM beneath it, something game programmers inevitably had to do. Another issue was the slowness of the datasettes and also the 1541 disk drives, which led programmers to develop "fast loader" routines instead of using the built-in data loading routines.
As to magazines, British mags Zzap!64 and Commodore User were the world's best selling titles. The tapes with game demos that usually came attached to the magazines were another treat.
One regret from those magic times? Never having finished my own game project called "Search And Destroy", a shoot'em'up in the likes of Armalyte and Turrican. Well, maybe some day...
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