It must've required magic to load those games
It would require magic for you to say something intelligent.
if you didn't also have tape or disk drive to plug into it.
Only in early days of the C64 were cartridges or even cassettes the dominant storage media. The disk drive got cheaper over time, and they brought out a second and cheaper model of it as well which was less shit. In fact, people who weren't poor (which doesn't describe me, mind) commonly had two 1541s, because you could program them to do sector copies, and copy basically anything.
I forget what the software was because I didn't have a C64 or floppy drives, but I knew plenty of people who had both. (I had an Apple ][+, then a used IBM PC 5150, and then I got an Amiga 500 which was succeeded by several other Amigas up to a 3000, and then I got a 386 and ran Linux and now here we are with me still running Linux.)