Many PC games through the mid-1980s were shipped as booters, for ease of use and for copy protection. The growing popularity of hard drives caused the shift to

Many PC games through the mid-1980s were shipped as booters, for ease of use and for copy protection. The growing popularity of hard drives caused the shift to key disks, code wheels/books, and other forms of copy protection. Same for many Apple II games. Although C64 does not have disk autoboot, one can argue that the same principle exists there too, again because of copy protection; many Commodore disk games use custom disk formats that Commodore DOS cannot read. `LOAD "*",8,1` loads a boostrap that in turn reprograms the drive to load the format for the rest of the game.