The enormous potential of personal computers for educational purposes was apparent not to just educators, but to smart computer brands all over the place who could use educational software to sell their systems to reluctant parents who might be thinking the kid is just going to play games on it.
Even more savvy were the software manufacturers who said right away that educational software could be fun and offer games and not just dry screens of math tests. One thing personal computers were ideal to teach was the useful skill of typing. Back then, before word processors, spell checks, and pdfs, people used typewriters to produce paper documents and many jobs required proficiency in the skill.
The Commodore VIC 20 has a magnificent keyboard and several software publishers put out typing training games for it. Let’s look at three.
Typing Tutor / Word Invaders (Academy Software, 1982)
This cassette contains Typing Tutor - a mostly no frills trainer, and Word Invaders, where those tutor lessons are applied to save the world from invading words. I'm really hoping the word "bespoke" comes up because I hate how that word is overused here in 2026. Before diving further, a quick reminder of how typing was taught back then. "ASDF" and "JKL;" are the home keys, where one places their eight fingertips as the central starting point to either tap on those keys or to reach each finger out from there to hit the other keys.
Typing Tutor is really four smaller programs. Each of those has tutoring for two skill levels, starting with 1 and 2, then the next program having 3 and 4, and so on. There are eight levels total, so four programs with two levels each. Those are all on one side of the cassette and Word Invaders is on the second side. That means that to train using levels 3 and 4 one would have to load the program starting at a very certain point on the cassette.
Cassette drives back then had three digit numeric counters with a button next to them to reset the counter to zero. To understand where to start, one rewinds the tape until it stops and resets the counter to zero. Now if one knows where the second or third program starts on the cassette, one fast forwards the tape to that point and starts there to load it. Academy Software couldn't tell the player that, apparently, as there is a space in the instruction manual top write down the counter number starting point for the programs for levels 3 and 4, 5 and 6, and 7 and 8. The previous owner did not bother to jot them down either, so it's up to me.
Well, now that I've tried out Typing Tutor a bit, and am not doing good on even level 1, I may not need to load up those advanced levels. The screen throws three lines of letters at the trainee, and I was able to get to 20 -30 WPM at best. Whatever I do on a keyboard at work, often with a mouse in my right hand, does not follow the home keys training I had in school before I ever owned a computer. Yet I can type pretty fast overall when composing emails or writing this blog.
Unless Word Invaders is that hard and I really need to get to 60 words per minute (how typing speed is measured), I think I'll put a pin in further tutoring. Firing up Word Invaders on side two of the tape, it is just one program and not four different ones. The player selects a level from A-D, with A representing the letters used in level 1 and 2 of Typing Tutor and so forth. The words will only be composed of those letters.
One then selects speed from 1-4 with 1 being the slowest. The invaders are various words and the player must type them away, space bars included, from left to right. They of course drop down lower and lower as the game progresses, but they eventually run out and the game is over. I was able to beat level A on the 1 difficulty with a score of 682, 28 errors, and 14.4 WPM. The manual indicates that 12 WPM are required to beat it on that speed setting, so that aligns.
Graphically it's pretty simple. The white ship at the top deploying words is just a white shape and the player's gun is just some built-in shape from the VIC 20's character set. Nonetheless, it is fun to play and definitely a good way to reinforce the tutoring one got from Typing Tutor. Together with Word Invaders, this cassette is really the full package, with a full, clinical typing trainer and a fun game. Academy Software added a sticker to the manual/cover of the game saying "RATED THE BEST EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM FOR THE VIC 20 IN CREATIVE COMPUTING MAGAZINE", a genuine accolade from a publication which was actually kind of a big deal back then for personal computer enthusiasts. After trying it, I can see why it won.
Type Attack (Sirius, 1982)
Designed by Jim Hauser and Ernie Brock, Programmed by Ernie Brock
Making a typing training arcade game was a serious business back them and Sirius software was on it, teaming up professional educator Jim Hauser with programmer Ernie Brock to create a slick, fast paced experience that is fun to play and presumably improves typing skill.
These guys did not just create a fun arcade game that improves typing; They created fifteen pre-programmed levels, or lessons, each progressively more difficult. On top of that, they include a "Lesson Creator" for the user to choose what letters are used in the Character Attack part of the game, and what words are used in the Word Attack part of the game.
That's right, Type Attack has two game sequences in it, the first being Character Attack. This is the Space Invaders style of gameplay I was assuming was the whole game, with an armada of letters over the player's head, descending but not shooting back. The player shoots back by typing the letters from the bottom up, without worrying about moving or aiming. Typing the letter sends a beam upward and eliminates it.
After two waves of Character Attack, Word Attack begins. In this sequence, short words move from right to left across the screen and the player must type the whole word and press the spacebar to shoot and eliminate it. There may be three or four words travelling across the screen at a time, but only the leftmost one is vulnerable and can be typed. If a mistake is made, the player can use the weird left arrow key on the VIC 20 at the upper left corner of the keyboard to back up.
As mistakes are made, energy is used up, shown as a bar along the right side of the screen. The player starts with 100 energy and one point is used up for each typing mistake. A whopping 35 units of energy are lost if the player fails Character Attack and lets the letters reach the bottom of the screen. Likewise, any word that passes off the left side of the screen in Word Attack cost one unit. However, each letter typed in the word passing overhead adds one point when the word is eliminated. That's a pretty cool scoring dynamic.
There's also an awesome bar on the left side of the screen that measures the aforementioned Words Per Minute (WPM). It's a nice touch and one would expect nothing less with a teacher leading the design. Type Attack turned out to be not only a great game with two different sequences, but a whole package of typing training and a lesson creator to practice specific letters or words one finds troublesome. It's not just Space Invaders with letters and words, and that was a pleasant surprise to discover.
Mastertype (Lightning Software, published by Broderbund, 1983)
By Bruce Zweig, VIC 20 Cartridge Version by James Fox and Edward Chu
I know I themed this article as "using Invaders to teach", but Mastertype forgoes Space Invaders for Space Zap, another arcade classic where the player defends a center base from attackers coming from all four compass directions (north, south, east, and west). In Mastertype, the enemy missiles come from the four corners instead, with a letter or word in each corner that must be typed to destroy the incoming projectile.
The ship in the center is where one types, and while the four incoming missiles move slow, they do not have far to travel before hitting the player's ship. Also, there are four of them. When I played the first lesson, I thought that there was a glitch where the letters stopped showing, but then I realized the lesson (again using "lesson" for game skill level) was about the home keys and what was showing on the screen was a colon, which in space looks like more background stars. However, there were not too many background stars so that one was really on me.
Broderbund was one of the greatest of the early software houses, and Mastertype comes with a 25-page, well-written and very organized instruction manual that covers all of the typing basics before even getting to the gameplay. I mean, this book has a troubleshooting guide and an appendix, as well as detailing what each of the eighteen pre-programmed lessons is about. The eighteenth lesson is actually common BASIC programming commands and words, a sign of how important that was at the time.
The cartridge boots up with a demo mode and when the demo player loses and it's ship is destroyed an awesome multicolor, psychedelic explosion expands across the screen from the center, with "THE WORDS WON" appearing at its end. It's quite dramatic, but typing was a serious business back then. Besides the demo mode, there is a beginner mode with just letters and not words, and an extensive submenu under that full of ahead-of-its-time options.
That submenu allows the player to reduce or increase the speed goals, redisplay a score after a game, change lesson, change case to upper or lower, and of course create a new lesson. The custom made lessons contain forty words with a maximum of eight characters each. Not that many Commodore VIC 20 owners had a disk drive, but the player-made lessons can be saved on tape or disk, with the disk option able to list a catalog of saved lessons if the player creates that many.
As far as the game itself, it does capture the pressure and tension of Space Zap quite well as the player strives to eliminate incoming missiles by typing the letters or words in time. When the word is typed the player presses the SPACE bar to zap, and a little astronaut pop up out of the ship and shoots at the missile. Each vulnerable quadrant of the ship has one shield that can be destroyed before a second hit to that spot destroys the ship and ends the game.
Mastertype, like Type Attack and Typing Tutor/Word Invaders, uses arcade gaming to help improve typing skills and is designed as a fun trainer. Broderbund claims on the back of the box that Mastertype "is the #1 best-selling typing tutorial". As far as I'm concerned, all three of these arcade game typing trainers were fun to play as well as fully viable training programs for those that need them. It's really a niche part of the early computer software days, but those who made them really put everything they could into making them complete software packages.
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