The amazing part was the reader comment section in the end, where people were writing letters to the magazine publishers with their modifications to programs from one of the magazines before, so patches were literally transmitted via paper.
To me as a child, I never understood that this was programming. This was just how I could play games on the device.
Amazing memories with the C64, and I was so lucky to get one as a child because it was more common in the human generations before me. Getting a used 386 turbo as the second device was literally child's play when I was learning to write assembly for it when I discovered an assembler program on its hard drive.