Committing the Sin of Unsealing: Dodge Cars for the Commodore VIC 20

 The Wizard's Magic Toy Box / 1982 / by Scott Elder

There are lots of games for the Commodore VIC 20 on EBay that I want but I only see them for sale for a huge amount of money because they are still sealed (I'm looking at you, Atarisoft titles). I've even passed on some affordable sealed games hoping for an open one to come along, leaving the sealed ones for those who want and can afford them. Collecting sealed games is certainly a thing, with some official agency now grading them and sealing them in more plastic presumably forever, to be held and traded without ever being played. I'm good with that but I collect them to play them, and maybe write a few things about them for shits and giggles. 

But a curious old game that no one but me cares about showing up sealed for less than fifteen dollars caught my eye recently and I pulled the trigger. It's a cassette game called Dodge Cars from the company The Wizard's Magic Toy Box that was based in San Jose, California back in 1982. I've previously wrote about their game Muncher (I've also acquired Search and Destroy but have yet to blog about it) and the pattern from their games is that they are simple but functional and basically fun, cheap games. They saw a market for Commodore VIC 20 cassette games at a discount and dove in, the plucky entrepreneurs that they were.

I pay so very little attention to the vast number of YouTube videos of retrogamers self-aggrandizing and pleading for likes and subscribes, but I know that they sometimes post unboxing videos of new games or special collectors editions of new games or whatever. For the unsealing of possibly the last sealed copy in existence (unconfirmed) of Dodge Cars, I made my first video:

As for the game itself, the title Dodge Cars also happens to be the instructions for playing. The player dodges cars. To elaborate on that, the player is a black car toward the top of the screen, facing and driving toward the bottom screen, into six lanes of oncoming traffic in the form of multicolored cars and trucks. Where I live in central Ohio some drunk or other type of idiot does that about once a week. 

This is a simple game, like the kind one might find written in BASIC in a copy of Compute's Gazette back in the day, but it plays great. The scrolling effect by seeing trees along the side of the road pass works well, and the pacing - starting out slow and building up speed - is perfect. Once it gets going it's over pretty fast, but in the meantime it's good fun.

The controls are tight and precise for a VIC 20 game, with the player's car responding so fast one can squeeze between two oncoming but slightly offset diagonally cars with some practice. The game shows the current top five high scores, but does not save them on tape, so they are lost when the VIC 20 is shut off. Back then, sessions with friends were often taking turns with a single player game, so this feature was welcome.

I've enjoyed all three of the games I've found on Ebay from The Wizard's Magic Toy Box and am eagerly watching for the fourth and final one they mention in their documentation. 

There is almost no information online about The Wizard's Magic Toy Box, but Dodge Cars was designed by Scott Elder, the same one behind the company Nufekop, who created and published Dodge Cars on their own. It is my suspicion that the Wizard either licensed the game from Nufekop and released it simultaneously, or they got the rights to publish it before Nufekop started up. The other two games from the Wizard that I have were designed by another person. 

To the two or three collectors of sealed Commodore VIC 20 games out there who find this article and are anguishing over my decision to unseal this ancient treasure, my sincere apologies for that. But for me, the play's the thing, and Dodge Cars plays pretty well for a cassette game that was sealed for forty-four years.