Three for the VIC 20 That I HAD To Get Back

 My previous Commodore VIC 20 collection was relatively small. It consisted mostly of games and applications that I bought between the summer of 1983 until the summer of 1985 when I landed the Commodore 64. I only picked up a few loose games after that. 

Here is the list of my previous Commodore VIC 20 games and other software from a printout of my inventory I had made in the 1990s:

I've reacquired fourteen of those so far. There were some games from then that I am not in any hurry to reacquire; but there are some absolute treasures that I have been searching for since I decided to get back into the Commodore VIC 20. Let’s look at three such masterpieces.

Protector (Synapse/HES)

Designed by Mike Potter, VIC 20 version programmed by Alick Dziabczenko

Protector had a history before being ported to the Commodore VIC 20, first at Crystalware then later that year with improvements at Synapse, one of the emerging Atari computer publishers. In fact Protector helped put them on the map.

“What if Defender had a tighter plot?” seems to be a question the designer asked when making this great side-scrolling shooter. Get this - the player starts on the left, has to carefully maneuver out of a twisty tunnel with a battery of laser guns at the entrance and sometimes an enemy seeker mine. 

Next, they fly past some mountains and over a city where an indestructible mother ship is meticulously picking up people and then moseying their way towards the right, over to a volcano where they drop them to their death. I seem to remember back in the day I could catch them at the last second with my ship, but I sure couldn’t do it here in 2026. The instruction sheet said that I could at lower difficulty.

So the player races the mothership by picking up as many of the stick dudes as they can, flying past the mothership and volcano to a second city, and dropping them off on the rooftops there. Their peril is still not over, though.

After the first city is emptied the volcano erupts, sending a lava flow toward the second city, where the player just dropped off whoever they could save. They must now be picked up and carried again, this time past some ground lasers, through another tunnel, and finally into a safe place to drop them off for good.

A side note here, and a sort of hazy memory: Back in the eighties when I was playing I flew diagonally into the corner there and saw a room with text, possibly credits. I was never able to replicate it though.

This game is classic-level difficult with super-sensitive thrust controls, poor diagonal flight, and a frantic ticking clock consisting of the sound of tiny pixel dudes being incinerated in a volcano instead of ticking. The music and sound effects are VIC 20-era great, but man this game is hard. 

It’s worth the frustration though, as the concept and execution of all of it are something to behold. Game designers back then were taking proven arcade hits and expanding on them in weird ways, and Protector was a prime example of that.

Serpentine (Broderbund/Creative)

Designed by David Snider, VIC 20 version programmed by Antirom)

Serpentine is a maze-chase masterpiece, inspired by the arcade game Jungler, that was another hit for Broderbund later brought to the VIC 20 by the prolific publisher Creative Software. 

You roam the maze as a segmented caterpillar and your three foes are the same. These enemies are colored red when they have as many or more segments than the player, and green when they have less. The goal is to eat their segments, head, and any eggs before they eat yours. 

Unlike Pac-Man, where the player has to gobble one of four power pellets on the screen to get a few seconds of turning tables on the enemy, Serpentine is a free-for-all where you and them are always vulnerable and always able to attack. It’s all about positioning and the back and forth of who’s got more segments. 

When the enemy is red only their segments can be eaten, meaning the player can simply follow them and gobble them up from behind. Well, it’s not that simple when there are two other enemies to worry about. The player can, however, attack any segment and not just the last one, so twisting around the maze to catch a caterpillar from the side and cutting off the rest of the segments is a better strategy. 

When the player has eaten enough segments to make it shorter than them, the now shorter enemy turns green and the head is vulnerable as well. On top of that, both the player and the enemies can gobble up frogs that appear randomly and hop about to gain a segment. 

After the player takes down one of the three foes, one of the remaining ones will create and drop an egg. Since this egg will eventually spawn another one of the caterpillars it is best to eat the egg before it hatches, and in the process gain another segment. 

The player also can drop an egg, which if not eaten when the level is cleared, hatches and becomes an extra life. That was pretty innovative at the time, to tie extra lives to a gameplay mechanic rather than a simple score total.

The VIC 20 version looks and sounds great but actually lags a little when a lot is going on, and in Serpentine there’s always a lot going on. Between caterpillars, frogs, and eggs, the game can go back-and-forth between the player just crushing it and then one wrong turn and it falls apart quick. Serpentine is an absolute blast to play for short, exiting arcade action and is a must-have game for the Commodore VIC 20.

Miner 2049er (Reston)

Designed by Bill Hogue, VIC 20 version programmed by Jerry Brecher

It's weird to think that most gamers around have never heard of Miner 2049er nor know of its explosive impact on the gaming world in 1983. Unveiled in late 1982 with the intention to license it to every other viable console and computer, it was really a departure from the previous model where if a game sold well on the console or computer it was created for, then it would be ported over to another system.

Multiple software companies, some that were not even in the videogame publishing world yet, signed on to port it to the announced systems, and the Commodore VIC 20 and 64 versions were done by Reston Software. Again, this kind of ambitious, pre-planned multiple platform licensing had not really been done yet. They coupled it with magazine ads, one of which was a two-page spread with the character of Bounty Bob looking over a train of mine carts, each with a console or computer system represented on its side along with the publisher. 

Was it that they knew they had a hit on their hands once they saw the finished product on an Atari computer? Who knows, but the game really is peak single-screen platformer coming out after Space Panic, Donkey Kong, and Lode Runner establishing the subgenre as one of the most fun of that era. Inspired by those, many game developers expanded on their gameplay and having subsequent screens with different gameplay elements was a winning formula.

The pure version of Miner 2049er has a whopping ten screens, each with more challenging jumping for sure, but also things like elevators, radioactive pits, and other dangers only the most patient players will ever see. There is also a time limit that definitely comes into play in later levels. Repetition, and learning how to take on each level is key.

To clear a level, the player has to walk on every spot of platform in that level. Doing so changes the floor from a pattern to a solid color. Enemies that are deadly to touch patrol certain parts of the platform, but become vulnerable for a few seconds after the player picks up one of several power-ups floating over the platforms. They flash a little before turning deadly again, and if this is sounding a bit Pac-Man, it's because it is - designer Bill Hogue admitted to as much in an interview later, that he was inspired to implement that monster dynamic by the arcade smash.

It was an unforgiving time for gamers back then, and Miner 2049er requires precise jumping and memorizing each level so on repeat visits (no continues, no saves, start over) the player can breeze through them better. It's a blast though, and satisfying once one knows how to get through it. I have the full Atari computer or 5200 version on my Nintendo Switch via the Atari 50th Anniversary game from a few years back, and I still play it there sometimes. So why did I reacquire it for the Commodore VIC 20 when the VIC has a watered down, seven-instead-of-ten-level version with inferior graphics?

Well, even the VIC 20 version is still good, challenging fun. Also, I snagged it cheap on a sudden Ebay sale that popped up, after watching another sale where the game still sits at $300. Mostly, though, my purchase of Miner 2049er back in 1983 was probably the first time I participated in a major, cross-platform video game phenomenon of that scale. Walking into that Waldenbooks store at Richland Mall in Mansfield, Ohio, and seeing those Reston Software boxes hanging on a rack for both the VIC 20 and Commodore 64 versions all shiny and new, remains a good memory.

Miner 2049er for the Commodore VIC 20 was definitely not the best translation of the game, but it was better than the Atari 2600 version. And it was my version, the best I could have at the time, and I'm glad to have it back in the library.

A.E. - Broderbund Really Did Port It to the VIC 20!

 I probably mention this is every VIC 20 article I’ve written, but in the early days of computer gaming, magazines were our main source for what was being released for consoles and computers. While the news and reviews did their best to keep up with an exploding market of game releases, the print ads filled in a lot of the blanks.

Some ads showcased multiple games together while others would focus on a single game, using the full page to show box art, screenshots, and usually a text description of the game. When you’ve got a gorgeous game with high resolution backgrounds, you pay for the full page ad. Broderbund decided to do that with A.E., at first released for the Apple and Atari computers, machines that could certainly handle the high resolution background graphics.

Broderbund actually partnered with a Japanese studio called Programmers-3, from which Jun Wada and Makoto Horai brought forth A.E. The VIC 20 version came a year later thanks to Steven Ohmert, who worked miracles with the hardware limitations of the machine.

From the description, A.E. is somehow Japanese for stingray, and our pollution-cleaning-stingray-shaped-robots are rebelling. As far as what is happening in those gorgeous backgrounds, the game is a fixed position shooter and the enemies deploy in squads of eight, flying around in complex, slithering patterns like the saucers in Attack of the Timelord on the Odyssey 2. 

So A.E. became just another one of those out-of-reach games for the lucky elite who had Apple and Atari computers. However, hope was kindled when months later the same ad appeared, with the addition of text saying it was either “now available” or “coming soon” for the VIC 20. Hey, the same thing happened with Crush, Crumble, & Chomp by Epyx and that game turned out to be very real.

I never saw it in my time as a VIC 20 owner then, and never tried to hunt it down later. I just assumed that it was never released and moved on. A lot of companies were promising lots of games ahead of the 1983 crash. When I began searching Ebay for VIC 20 games, though, it popped up and I remembered that old ad. I watched the sale of the game on Ebay for a few months before pulling the trigger on the most expensive VIC 20 title I have purchased so far.

The copy that I got from Ebay had the gorgeous box, instructions, and the cartridge, all in great shape. This rare treasure of a game was once rented out at a place called Fireside Video ($3.50 a day according to the sticker), which the Ebay seller claims had closed in the mid 1990s and whose stock was just now being sold off. There were several games I got for the VIC 20 last year with the Fireside Video stickers on the boxes or games. One wonders how many other stashes of old games are sitting out there waiting to be discovered in such places. 

Anyways, A.E. at last! I was eager to see if the VIC 20 version even came close to the Apple and Atari screenshots shown in the ad. The VIC 20 is not as powerful of a computer and is not known for handling sprites on the screen, meaning the designers usually work with the graphics of the VIC 20's built-in character set.

Plugging in the cartridge and firing it up, the player is greeted by a good title screen, with the original designers and the VIC 20 programmer who achieved this software marvel all credited in flashing letters. The classic Broderbund logo is shown at the top as well. If the player does nothing, the attract mode shows a quick sample of gameplay before going back to the title screen. This mode eventually cycles through the four different backgrounds used on the VIC 20, which is good since I haven't gotten good enough at A.E. yet to see the last screen.

I started the game and expected the usual fixed position Space Invaders shooter vibe, but something else was going on. The enemies appeared, tiny but visible, and when I pressed fire the twin bullets just exploded above my ship. I was trying to shoot frantically at first, but then assumed that this was one of those one-shot-at-a-time games. Ok, I can adjust and aim. Something was still off, though, as each bullet was still just exploding in a cloud over my head as soon as I released the fire button.

Once again, I realized that while there was only a small instruction sheet, I should probably read it. Sure enough, the missiles one fires detonate when the player releases the button, so the player needs to hold the fire button down until the right moment to release its explosion. Preferably, just ahead of the serpentine movements of the pack of enemy ships. Where have I had to detonate a missile to stop another missile before? 

Missile Command, one of the greatest games of the arcade age, had the player do that from three fixed positions on the bottom of the screen. A.E. does that as well, but with missile batteries that move left and right. That is a very original take on a fixed position shooter and something I had not expected. Nor had I expected the tiny enemy ships to sometimes disappear behind parts of the high resolution backgrounds, but they do!  I guess it was to give the game an early "2.5D" sense of depth to the screen, but it really adds to the challenge.

The VIC 20 version has four different backgrounds while the original Apple and Atari versions had eight. The eight ships emerge and twist their way around the screen, occasionally taking a shot at the player, or flying low enough to crash into their missile battery, and then disappear. Taking out all eight before they disappear and eight new ships emerge nets the player a "Perfect Attack". A counter on the right, below the score and cool logo, tracks the perfect attacks and when three are made, a tone sounds and the next screen loads up.

The backgrounds are a nice change, but the more important difference in the subsequent screens is that the enemy movements become completely different. It's relatively easy to sort of memorize the several different attack patterns on the first screen, but that knowledge becomes useless on the second one. Also seen on the second screen - the eight ships split into two groups of four, each doing their own thing in a different part of the screen. Essentially, the player has to learn the movement patterns of each screen's attackers and aim and shoot accorindly. I assume they are different on the later screens I did not reach.

A.E. plays quick and fast like a good arcade shooter should, but there is a lot of very original gameplay and depth of challenge in front of, and sometimes behind, the pretty screens. It's an extremely rare cartridge for the VIC 20 and was very expensive, but it was worth it to close the forty-plus year gap between me seeing that ad and actually playing the game. A.E. shines graphically even on the VIC 20 and is a refreshingly original take on shooters as well. 

Monster Maze: First Person Pac-Man on the VIC 20

 Monster Maze by Robert A. Schilling and published by Epyx for the Commodore VIC 20, not to be confused with the top-down maze chase game by Creative Software with the exact same name, was a game that I had not heard of back in the day. Which means, pre-internet, that it wasn’t mentioned in any of the issues of Electronic Games or Compute’s Gazette that I had acquired.

Epyx, also known as Automated Simulations, was a top-tier publisher that, like many of them I’ve already mentioned, ported a few if its Apple and Atari games to the VIC 20, and they did it in style. Unlike their more complex games that require the cassette-memory expander cartridge combination, Monster Maze was issued on a cartridge on both the VIC 20 and Atari computers.

Having no expectations other than a screenshot showing the wireframe first-person view, I spent a pretty penny on Ebay where I purchased and brought over a complete copy from Canada, somehow successfully, in these times. As with all the Epyx releases, it came in a sturdy box that has held up remarkably well over its forty-plus years in existence. Inside the box was the cartridge, a sturdy, two sided instruction and command summary card, a brief instruction sheet about inserting the cartridge, and of course the warranty registration card. 

With any Ebay purchase, I am eager to test the game and leave feedback for the seller before I really dive into it. Going into that without expectations went like this:

I put in the cartridge, which fit well in the finicky slot, and fired it up. I select "Progressive Difficulty" and to start at level zero, whatever that means. I'll read up on that later. The provided two-sided command summary card had more details on that, but I skimmed it over and the game had started. 

So, first person view, got it…Forward to move forward in the primitive 3D wireframe corridors, left to turn left, right to turn right.  Pulling back on the joystick is the command to jump across a pit, it seems.

Press the button to get a map screen that covers a partial area of the 16x16 grid map. I'm represented as an X in a green square, the large red dots are monsters, the numerous smaller dashes are gold bars, the O is a hole in the ceiling, a zero is a pit, and the yellow plus signs are...

I check the card, those are "vitamin pills", and eating them allows the player to successfully attack the monsters roaming the maze instead of just running from them. There is a thirty step limit on their use, so the player has to eat the vitamin pills and chase the ugly things down. 

Wait a second...Monster Maze is first-person Pac-Man! WOW! 

This is exactly the kind of original, refreshing, and unique game I was looking for among the many great VIC 20 games I have acquired. I had to dig into this as there were a ton of questions. Even the above statement was a little over-generalizing things when it came to this weird-ass title. There was more going on.

Going back to starting up the game, the stated goal is a high score and the title screen asks if the player wants "Progressive Difficulty Levels Y/N?". Selecting yes will increase the difficulty level as the player's score increases. This is a scale of 0-8, with 8 being the hardest. I figured the standard way to play would be saying yes to the progressive difficulty levels and starting at zero, so I did that. It turned out that in my testing that by the time the player has cleared almost all of the ten levels, that level 8 difficulty will be reached. 

As the player's score increases, so do those levels. Nowhere in the documentation does it say this, but:

• Level 1 - 1,000
• Level 2 - 2,000
• Level 3 - 4,000
• Level 4 - 6,000
• Level 5- 10,000
• Level 6 - 12,000 ?
• Level 7 - 16,000 ?
• Level 8 - 20,000 ?

Starting the game and getting dropped into the maze can mean instant danger. An alert sound and the word MONSTER will appear at the bottom if there is immediate danger and the monster is within a few spaces. If that fails to happen right away, the urge will be to start running around like it's Pac-Man, gobbling up gold bars and vitamin pills, but it is best to check the map for the locations of nearby monsters, vitamin pills, pits, and ceiling holes right away. Yes, it's first-person Pac-Man, but it's strategic, careful, first-person Pac-Man. There are times where the player clears the maze of enemies for awhile and has the time to gobble up everything with gleeful impunity, but at those higher difficulty levels the enemy AI will require closer watching and careful maneuvering to avoid or hunt, among other dangers.

It is played in real-time as well, meaning that the monsters stay on patrol and keep moving even if the player stands still. There is not a built-in pause feature so just standing around can mean eventual death. A workaround I found is the vitamin pill - using one puts the word CHARGED on the screen to let the player know it is active. Its use is limited to thirty player steps and there is no warning that it is about to expire. So the player can charge up, stand still, and go get some snacks. Until the player comes back and takes a step, the charge counter does not count down. 

The player is challenged to learn a balance between the play screen and the map screen, as the player cannot move while on the map screen. When a monster was near, I found myself checking the map after every move, to see if the monster was headed my way. I learned to sort of load up sections of the map in my head and then quickly clear them back in the game without getting disoriented.

Graphically, this game uses the VIC 20's built in character set to construct the map, the wireframe line corridors in first-person, as well as the score and other text at the bottom of the screen. In first-person, nearby monsters flicker in and out when a few spaces away. This is disorienting at times, but as one can see in the above screen capture, they're not much to look at. 

It's noted briefly on the command card "As you change directions, the colors on the screen change, too, to help you orient yourself". In practical terms, this means that the screen border color changes as you change compass directions. This is an extremely important piece of information to leave off of the command summary side of the card, but once again, I'll make it simple for any future players of this game who stumble across this blog. Match the border of the screen to the handy chart shown. If your border is for example magenta, you are facing west, or the left side of the screen.

Nonetheless, the graphics are functional enough for the VIC 20, and I am here for the gameplay. The map is 16 x 16 tiles, and there are ten floors connected by pits and wrapping around - so when the player falls into a pit on the ninth floor, they emerge on floor zero. The goal is to clear each floor of every gold bar, however, as that nets the player a bonus once they drop down to the next level. So, say you run into trouble on the fifth floor and fall into a pit to the sixth. The bonus is lost, but the missed gold bars will still be there should the player continue dropping through the floors ahead and wrapping back around to it. 

Want to know something mind-blowing though? The monsters wander into the pits, too, and in fact can be guided into them regardless of their difficulty level. Even on the zero level, monsters can drop in from above at any time. This seems to indicate that, if the player stayed stationary after clearing out all the monsters in a level, the rest of the monsters would eventually fall through to the player’s level. From the start of the game, the thirty monsters are constantly getting sifted to lower levels and wrapping around, I think....? On one level I was playing, it was raining men as five more showed up after I dispatched the three that were already there.

I tried sitting under a pit fully charged for an hour or so but saw no indication that the monsters were falling on my head and dying. I might try testing it more at some point. Even with advanced AI at higher levels, if there is a pit nearby they will probably fall into it . Oddly enough, if they see you across a pit in first person view, they just spaz out on that spot, frustrated that they can’t jump across like the player. Switch to map view while they do that and there is a good chance they then walk into the pit.

The downside is that the player eventually has to go down there, too, and it seems that following them down that same hole a few seconds later, unless the player is charged with the vitamin pill, is a death sentence. Basically there is a slight chance that anytime the player uses a pit to drop down, they land on a monster’s head and die. I developed a strategy of saving the last vitamin on each level for the drop if I could, as it carries over the turn countdown of 30 steps from the previous level. Drop into the pit, check the map while still charged from the previous level, and go from there. 

The game does have a chance at producing a map with a gold bar in a dead end that is inaccessible due to a pit. The pit can be jumped in a straight line but not diagonally, so it takes a certain kind of dead end for that to happen. It occurred twice in the five or six sessions I played in preparing this article.  

All that can be done in this situation is the same thing the player does after clearing the ten levels, which is to press “R” on the keyboard to Restart. A prompt comes up that asks the player “WANT A NEW MAZE (Y/N)?”. Selecting “Y” restarts everything, as expected, but choosing “N” resets and restocks the maze but maintains the player’s current score, number of lives, and of course the difficulty level of the monsters. It’s what the kids call New Game Plus these days, I reckon.

The enemy AI, on a Commodore VIC 20 in 1982, is impressive. At Level 3 they start to pursue, quite doggedly, and at 7 they are relentless. I got cornered on a few occasions by several of them at that level seeming to act in unison to block multiple potential paths of escape. It might have been my imagination, but they also seemed to back away if they were chasing me and I was approaching a vitamin pellet. In addition their own escape AI is elusive as a snake and once you are charged up on a vitamin they are suddenly half a screen away, somehow. I suspect they are actually faster than the player at that point.

I had some hopes that with the first person perspective working so well on this game once the player gets into it, that there would be more of a campaign goal rather than an arcade score goal, though. But hey - it's first-person Pac Man so having a high score definitely aligns with the essence of the inspiration. I quit on my playthrough with a score of 20491, 5 lives remaining, and the monsters cranked up to 8. If I wanted to continue that score, I would have needed to reset and restock the maze and start over clearing the ten levels with those monsters still at the maximum Level 8. Maybe someday.

I can only speculate, of course, but it's as if designer Robert A. Schilling got a great ten-level wireframe maze up and running on the Commodore VIC 20 or Atari 800 and then looked around for how to fill it, and instead of thinking Dungeons and Dragons, he stopped at the arcade and saw Pac-Man. The world may never know. It's some kind of genius either way.

There are layers beneath the label of "first-person Pac-Man" though, that make this game great. For its time the graphics are functional - even the silly, blinky monster constructed out of various built-in VIC 20 character graphics. The wireframe walls move as they should when the player is zipping around the maze. The increasingly difficult enemy AI can turn the later part of the game into a fast-paced and frantic battle of careful movement coupled with absolute panic, which are a nice change of pace after some of the empty levels with no monsters and tedious gold bar harvesting of every square of the maze.

Monster Maze for the Commodore VIC 20 is a unique arcade game requiring strategy and a little luck to enjoy. It's first-person Pac-Man with the strategy and movement of a dungeon crawler, lots of its own design idiosyncrasies, and the potential for weird stuff to happen with the enemy AI. Like all the Epyx games, this is a must have for any Commodore VIC 20 collection and showcases the system's ability to do this type of 3D view. 

I haven't been following the VIC 20 homebrew scene, has anybody ported Doom yet? Or Wizardry?