10 Games to Revisit on the Commodore Vic-20

Long, long ago, I wrote an article for COMPUTE's Gazette with a game called Freeze Factory. Look it up. It was a crude version of Pengo :)

Pirates cove.. voodo castle.. fantasy land... good text base games

All great games. My favourite ‘tape’ game was Amok, a berserk clone. My favourite cartridge games were Pole Position and Jungle Hunt which were both amazing Atari ports and way better than their 2600 counterparts

The VIC20 was my first computer in 1983. I don't think I had many games, but I remember having Arcadia by Imagine software, and I was amazed at the time that I had an arcade style game.

Have vic 20 it us cassette tape with games on it.

The Vic 20 was my first console back then. My cousin had a commodore 128. Nice video🤙🏻

I don't remember too many cartridge games. But I remember getting Compute! Magazine and typing in games in Basic for hours, and then saving on the cassette drive. Had a cool skiing game, and Crazy Climber, if I remember correctly.

To clarify, for those of you not around then, each month the magazine had a handful of games, written in Basic. You had to type in sometimes hundreds of lines of code, and then save them to load up at will. The problem was, if you made any typos, the game would of course, not run properly. I remember many a day going through the typed program, just to find that I had used a period instead of a comma, or something similar. Fifty percent fun, Fifty percent hell, but 100 percent memorable.

I forgot I had Star Trek SOS as a kid on my VIC - your video brought it all rushing back! Great video and thanks for the rememories 😊😊

I grew up with a Commodore Vic-20 and my favourite games were Scorpion, Sidewinder and Escape from Mount Drash (of which I wish I kept, as I have heard it fetches quite a pretty penny nowadays).

My 1st computer.

Plaque Attack and GORF were some of my favs

Thanks for sharing. I'm always hungry for more VIC-20 coverage. Surprised you didn't mention Donkey Kong or Bandits!

Greetings from an 80's UK owner of the VIC-20 (My first ever computer) i'll always remember trying to complete The Count (a text adventure on cartridge) And it was so bloody hard it was untrue, you literally just had to guess words as there was no help whatsoever! To this day i'm still stuck on a drainpipe on the side of a castle looking up at a sodding window🤷‍♂🤣

I got a Vic-20 for my 12th birthday (no tape drive) and spent 14 hours on it on the first day. Obviously I couldn't save anything until I finally got a cassette drive. At the peak of my Vic programming powers I made a handful of games which included a Space Invaders clone which had graphics, sound, joystick control and used some machine code for moving some of the sprites. Good times and a lot of fun!

I remember having a vic20 when I was a kid, I didn't have enough money to buy carts so me and my friends worked out a way to copy them onto tape, use a 8k ram cart and change the memory area the ram appears in with the dip switches inside the 8k cart, then loading in the cart image from tape and running it like the game cart was inserted, great times.....

Abductor would have to be in the mix. Surely!?

I can remember going to my local Chemist in Australia back in the very early 80s where they had a Vic 20 set up for anybody to play, I think the game was called "Raid on Fort Knox". Awesome game it was!

Would not the C64, being younger than the VIC 20, be the little brother?

I liked ghost and goblins and paperboy.

I got a VIC-20 for my 13th birthday. I preferred the various Scott Adams text adventures over video games. Crazy experience with the "Mission Impossible" text adventure. I had the cartridge inserted and ran a program with random PEEK statements. Apparently the range that was being PEEK'd was where the code was and I started seeing rooms from the game that I've seen, but some that I didn't. It wasn't the actual code, but snippets. Being a PEEK statement it was simply returning values in memory that were on the cartridge. It didn't tell me how to get to the rooms, but at least I knew there were rooms yet to be discovered. I figured it out eventually and completed it! Upgraded to a C128d a few years later.

I used to have a Vic 20 I played every game you showed here,plus gorf and revenge of the mutant lamas i loved that machine, I still miss it to this day,,,each time see one it just takes me right back in time....

Gridrunner is some serious stress. Mountain King is also quite frustrating. OMEGA RACE! Also good rendition is Omicron on Commodore 64. Star Trek Strategic Operations was great for arcade and Atari 2600 (surprisingly, one of the best Atari games), never knew there was a Vic-20 version. My favourite game was called "Killer Comet" because it was a game you can "program" yourself by copying basic from a book: 10 Print "Killer Comet"...

I think Pac-Man for VIC20 is a great game.

Vic-20 was my first colour computer, was bought for me as an upgrade to my ZX-81 👍🏻

I’ve always loved the C64 and have never actually seen a VIC-20 in real life. I’m considering buying one this year. What’s not to love? A nice white and brown Commodore 64 look alike - Yes please.

The only thing I’m confused by is the 5K RAM. Will I need to expand this to play most of these games?

Still have Gorf and Shamus carts since my childhood. Try to play my Vic20 once a year :)

I played few minutes ago Street Sweeps game. It is very hard maze game. It's like Pacman without those safe spots!

I know that comparing a VIC-20 to a ZX80 is not a fair comparison, as the VIC-20 has a floating point BASIC, colour graphics, and sound, but the ZX80 was under $200USD.

Rockman was my ultimate favourite. All those fiendish creatures! It was a nice take on balderdash. I have very fond memories of my Vic20. You could do so much with it thanks to DIY projects like creating a light pen and adding a voice synthesiser. My parents gave my brother and I a Vic20, then alas I sold and upgraded to an Amiga 500 which was awesome.

I was expecting to see WarGames in this list.
The first cart I bought with my own money in the day.
Give it a look. Pretty fun.

My most valued vic20 game was donkey Kong

You really need to run these with scanlines/CRT mode for it to look authentic.

Outworld - my favorite, together with Gridrunner

First game I created was for the VIC 20, later ported to the C64. It was a text adventure, and the only graphics was the opening scene. It was called Ghost Ship and I sold it through the software kiosks in the San Francisco area that were popular by the end of the 80s. The idea was people would buy the cassette for a couple dollars and if they liked the game, they would mail in what they felt appropriate to the author. LOL -judging from what I earned, I was no Sid Meier, but it was fun getting my foot in the door with early shareware. I did end up as a career game artist, rarely touching code again.

You forgot Mobile Attack. I had a copy of that, and sure hope my late father didn't dump my old Commodore vic 20 stuff. Cuz Mobile Attack is one of the most rarest games ever made. I cannot find another copy of that anywhere online!

Gorf was my favourite game

I remember loving Cosmic Cruncher...I mean, a giant Commodore Logo in place of Pac-Man!

I got the Vic20 for Christmas when I was 12, and later the C64. I had OmegaRace and a few other games. Space shooters and adventure games were so much fun. I loved browsing for games at Montgomery Wards. Also I joined a Commodore club at my local library that was mostly 40 or 50 year old men customizing cartridges and expanding the capabilities of the systems, like system memory. So many memories saving and loading games on the Vic20 cassette tape player. Entering programs published in magazines was fun even if painstakingly difficult to type endless pages of hexadecimal characters.

My family was poor growing up and one year our parents surprised us for Christmas with a VIC-20 and a tape deck. The ONLY game we had for it was a tape called "Snackman" and we played the snot out for almost a year. We eventually got many more games on cartridge for it and also got a disk drive a few years later. We ended up getting a Commodore 64 and the VIC-20 kinda got forgotten about. I still reminisce about the VIC to this day.

I picked one up last year, in box, with the tape deck, also in box, for free last year. Was my first computer. Loved it!

My Brother and I had an VIC20 in 1981. My favorite Games were Jelly Monsters, Lunar Lander and Spiders of Mars as far as I remember. Also Jelly Monsters graphics was looking stunning for that time.

I had a VIC 20 as my first computer as a kid. I bought Avenger based on the box art, thinking it was a 3D shooter - it was only on the way home on the bus, reading the instructions, I thought, 'Wait, is this Space Invaders?' I was gutted, but, to be honest, it is probably the BEST Invaders clone on an 8-bit machine. My brother bought Road Race at the same time - great clone of Atari's Night Driver.

I loved radar rat race, miner 2049, gorf, and horse racing

Commodore Vic 20 was Technicality the big brother ❤

How about Raid On Moscow? It was the number one dorm game at University of Waterloo in 1984. Good times!

Back in the day (in the UK) I had a VIC20. It was my first computer, followed by a C64, Amiga 500 then an Amiga 1200 before finally moving to the world of the PC.

Demon attack scared the shit out of me as a kid 😅

I’m From Brazil and I Love the VIC-20 ❤

The Vic 20 was my first computer. But only really remember Gorf & Attack of the Blue Meanies