10 Games to Revisit on the Commodore Vic-20 

My dad passed away in 2013. I remember him playing the Vic 20 with me and my brother. I inherited 5 of them with all his games. My favorite would be voodoo castle

I love the VIC-20. It was my very 1st computer. I brought me soooo much joy learning about the computer in the "golden age" of early PC.

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!

The Vic 20 was my first ever home gaming experience. I'm glad I subscribed here. Just had a trip down memory lane. I Used cassette format on pal. Galaxians, which looks an awful lot like your first review was my go to. I learned how to type Basic on the Vic too. Who remembers the tutorial book included? Good ol days 🙂

Radar Rat Race... the three blind mice theme song is burned into my memory.

We got a vic 20 after a pong system. I loved radar rat race, and jupiter lander!

The commodore Vic 20 was the first computer that my family owned in our household we didn't actually get it until the 90s but it was amazing and I have fond memories of it amazing thank you for this video you brought back great memories

I have always ignorantly dismissed the Vic 20 , favouring its more powerful C64 sibling. I was very wrong. Thank you, John for your excellent and enlightening video.

I bought a VIC-20 from a friend in the early 80s and immersed myself in it. I learned to program simple things after hours of study from books and the magazine "Commodore Power and Play". My favorite games were "Demon Attack" and "Omega Race".

I still have my original Vic-20 from 1981. Great memories. One of the best times I remember is myself and another friend packing up our Vic's and going to another friends house who also had one. We ended up with 3 Vic 20's in the same room, all trying to beat each other's high score in Dodgecars. I remember us carrying my big old black and white console TV down the street just so I had something to hook up to it.

We had it good here in the UK with the VIC.. Jeff Minter wrote so many awesome games for it and the sound effects on his games are timeless. Vic-Men, Myraid, Perils of Willy, Wunda Walter, Bongo, Metagalactic Llamas, etc etc etc. Just wonderful memories and a fantastic episode.... Thank you John.

The Vic20 has a lot of charm.

I had one of these waaay back. It was my first computer and Blue Meanies from Outer Space my first introduction to coding. I used to go into the code and change it to give me higher scores, make it easier/harder etc. I had Omega Race, used to spend hours on it, and funnily 10 years later came across a cocktail table version in College! I loved the VIC and was sad to let it go and upgrade to C64, but I could only afford 1 computer at a time. Great Video, thanks!

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.

I was all in on the 64/128, but I've never played the Vic-20, so most of these games were brand new to me. Awesome video, John!

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....

Shamus was definitely one of the best games I'd ever played. Mine came on a turbo loading cassette - something unusual for a Vic-20. I remember it was loaded by the time the cassette counter got to around 014/015. Amazing - and smooth moving graphics instead of character blocks moving around. That Mountain Climb game looks really good for a Vic game! Submarine Commander was another one of my favourites from Thorn Emi.

I recently discovered Submarine Commander for the Vic 20. And its a very good submarine simulator.. You are basically commanding a diesel submarine stalking convoys in the meditereanean sea. Sinking as many as you can without being sunk yourself. It simulates damage and repairs. You can run aground as well or sink to the bottom.

Didn’t realize the games looked so good ... we had a 2600 so didn’t get into the Vic 20 .. nice video John

The vic-20 was probably the first home video games I ever played...my grandparents had one. Played a lot of Jupiter Lander, Draw Poker and Radar Rat Race. Good times.

Love the Vic-20, my mate had one before I got my first computer.

The VIC-20 is more like the older brother, not the little brother.

My parents bought one around the time I was Bourn and I still have it and it still works, I'm turning 40 at Xmas, looks like we both stood the test of time, happy birthday vic

I had most of those games. I really used to like typing in games from magazines and trying to reverse engineer them to do cool things on the VIC. I remember drawing my own graphics on graph paper and entering them in with datasets. Then doing little animations. I wish at the time I had a floppy disc drive for it but I had the cassette. I spent summers on the thing and had so much fun tinkering around with it. My favorite cartridge games were Cosmic Cruncher, Jupiter Lander, Demon Attack, Radar Rat Race, Avenger, GORF (how did you not include GORF???), and of course Omega Race. There were some nifty cassette games too but we didn't have access to them like they did in the U.K. A year or two after the C64 came out, it was really hard to find games for the Vic. I always wondered if the Commodore and 3rd Party developers didn't drop support what kind of neat things they could have come up with. I am interested in Shamus now after your review. Looks really cool. Great review!

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.

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🤷‍♂🤣

We only had one cartridge game for the VIC-20, Submarine Commander and it was AWESOME!

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.

Blast from the past! I haven't seen Vic-20 since the early 80s. My friend's dad was an early tech adopter (microwave, cordless phone, VCR... etc.) and I remember going to his house to play around with the Vic-20. I didn't realize it had a cartridge slot. I think we always ran stuff off of tapes or entered the programs ourselves. Of the games shown in this video, I'm only familiar with Shamus and it was only of my favorites but I played it on the Atari 800.

I know I'm about a year late to the comment party, but I just discovered this video - great work, John, and thanks for highlighting some of the best cartridge-based games for this system. It was my first home computer, purchased for my birthday in 1982, and the one I cut my programming teeth on (CBM BASIC and 6502 Assembly). Among the games you feature here, I had Omega Race and Gridrunner - both still among my all-time favorites. I sold my original VIC-20 after getting a C64 in early 1984, but a couple of years ago picked up a good condition VIC-20 and am reliving some of that early '80s fun.

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

My older brother owned a VIC-20 back in 1982-83. I spent many hours playing Gridrunner on it, easily my favorite computer game.

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 late grandmother had a Commodore VIC-20. Games she had were Cosmic Cruncher, Slots, Draw Poker. My sister and I used to play Cosmic Cruncher a lot, and my sister even used a pattern which worked each time. I used to type in programs from magazines at the time, and I spent hours doing that. My grandmother used to get upset at me for being on it for hours. I acquired a Commodore 64 from my cousin and I went to town on that thing. But for nostalgia’s sake, the VIC-20 does hold a place in my heart. It only had 5K of RAM, but with the little it had, programmers really pushed it.

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.

Awesome video, it was my first computer where i learned to program on and played qlot of games on. Thank you for bringing me back to memory lane.

Commodore Vic 20 was Technicality the big brother ❤

Was my 1st computer. I remeber seeing ultra-cool 'The Count' game and wanted it, and got it! Well, it was a text adventure. I remember there was no screenshots on the box. I didn't know what was an "adventure game"!!!! I was shocked and gladly, the shopkeeper swapped the game for anoher, which I think was 'Jupiter Lander' (superior to the Commdore 64 version!!!!!). My favourite ever Vic-20 game is 'Amok', though. In this maze game you shoot robots before they get you. It is GREAT!!!

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!

After owning a commodore 64 for a few years I noticed a broken vic-20 in my uncles loft and I was fascinated by it as it looked almost identical to the c64 and i was curious to see what it was like so I started collecting games for the system and then got a second hand vic 20 from a market, I plugged my c64 tape deck into it and it wouldn't work, when I opened it up it was only a blown fuse which caused this so I wrapped it in tin foil and it worked perfect, I also managed to get a switchable ram expansion for it to take it up to 32k and had a copy of perils of willy, I also liked typing in basic programmes onto it, the language was almost identical to the c64, some of the vic games would load onto the c64 but would never work 100% as the character size was different, probably a basic adventure game would work and maybe vice versa.

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 😊😊

Wow. I love the c64 but the colours and sounds of this is amazing! Darn you for making me want more machines 😅

Amok, Froggee, Skramble, Krazy Kong, Omega Race, Snake Pit, Blitz... names that come to mind when trying to remember what I used to play.

The vic20 was very important for me and my friends. We played it so much, that is how my best friend started becoming a rich programmer.

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!

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.

Loved Mountain King on the 2600. I thought it was challenging and a bit different than other 2600 games. The Vic 20 version looks like it plays a bit faster. Thanks for sharing.

I started with the VIC-20 in about 1983. I was completely enamored with Scott Adams text-adventure games. I jumped from the Vic to the C=128 when it was being sold in Toys-R-Us. LOL

The VIC was my first computer when I was a kid, and though my parents sold it to help pay for it’s replacement, I still have fond memories of it. Now I’m older and reliving my childhood, I have a much better VIC setup than I ever had as a kid, and have about half of the games you demonstrated. Back in the day the only one I had was from your list was Gridrunner, which I loved. Unlike the version you showed, where I grew up in the UK, Gridrunner like most other games was sold on cassette not cartridge though. I’m looking forward to finding copies of some of the other games you showed that I’m not familiar with.

I remember getting a VIC-20 back around 1984 or so, around the time I was 22. I remember having mostly text adventure carts like Pirate's Cove, Adventure and Dracula's Castle (I think it was Adventure, where I kept ending up in a hollow stump, turning and a guy with a pitchfork and tale was behind me...Oh! Hell! :)). But I also recall Omega Race and Gorf. It was a pretty fun little system.

I had a few neighbors that had vic-20 and I had the C-64 but I was still fascinated by the Vic. I ended up picking one up really cheap in a thrift store a long time ago and had some fun with it, even typed a few programs. Sad thing is that the last time I hooked it up I got the black screen of death!.

As a kid in the '80s I was one of those owning a C64, not knowing what a VIC20 was. A friend of mine owned a C16, I realised it was weaker than my C64 so I assumed it was the C64's predecessor. Funny how wrong I was; while the C16 is the VIC20's successor, it was also released AFTER the C64. :-) Anyway, around 1998 I acquired a VC20 (that's a German VIC20 ;-) ) which ended up in the attic until October 2019. That's when I bought an LCD CCTV monitor, an aftermarket PSU, an A/V cable and a VIC20 cartridge; River Rescue. I still had The Arcade joysticks from my C64, so used one of those. Hooked up and booted up the VC20: wow, the C64's older brother STILL worked!!! I was very impressed at what this computer is capable of, despite it's limitations! I ended up buying more cartridges: K-Star Patrol and Mine Madness. I also bought a cartridge expansion slot: so much easier than fumbling in the back! One day I hope to own a boxed PAL-version of Lode Runner: that game is legendary on any platform. Shamus and Star Trek will also end up in the collection! For now I like River Rescue best!

I used to make games on this computer in the 80s when I was 7 years old. Really cool ..

Those Commodore game covers are cool as hell.

My favourite and one of the first 2 games I ever played on a home computer was Jupiter Lander, a Vic 20 cartridge. In the following years I became adept at programming on the Commodore 64 and had a number of games published, and some time around 1990 I replayed Jupiter Lander and hacked the cartridge to disassemble the code. The software sprites were quite amazing, and the programming skills of the Japanese developer were just off the scale expert. For a system with no native sprites and generally very poor graphical ability, what the developer had fit into 8k of RAM was nothing short of incredible

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.

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"...

This brings back memories...Of course Avenger and Omega Race but also one you didn't mention I remember playing a ton of was Gorf.

i remember playing Cosmic Cruncher (bad Pac-man clone) when it came out in '82. Vic-20 was on display in a new "Compu-Centre" store. (the store chain was popular software/Video Game boutique in Eastern Canada)

I had a VIC-20 gold label before getting a Commodore 64. Programmed my own games, made a speech synthesizer. Learned 6502 code on it all before getting a Commodore 64. Unfortunately I lost my VIC-20 along with everything I wrote for it when I moved in late 1986.

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.....

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

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).

The best thing about the ViC-20 was the ease by which you could program it. Once you got to know the POKE commands for the sound and colour, you were away. The C64 was a more advanced computer, however, the BASIC was exactly the same as the ViC and even the PET before it. Trying to control sprites and the SID chip using BASIC was very hit and miss. Which is why the ViC was easier to program.

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.

Loved the VIC - Omega Race was an excellent port, and the first game I ever made (with my best mate at the time) was on this old beastie. 'Drunken Denis and the Search For Gin'...good times. :)

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.

What's there's not to love about the VIC20, it's kinda the follow up to the PET pluss the parent to the greatest computer of all time: the C64.🔥🏆🕹️👾✨

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

Another way to experience VIC 20, is via the MiSTer project. Suggest you check it out (if you haven't already). I'd say Avengers and Demon Attack are my picks. Thanks for the video!

Thank you for bringing some cheer John!,

The Vic20 was the first computer we had, loved Omega Race Supervaders and Bomber Run. Just acquired a vic again after all these years and great to see some games I'd not seen before

I had the vic-20 when I was a kid. Born in 76. This brings back good memories. Ahh, the 80's, simpiler times.

I had a Vic-20 when it first came out. I loved it! My fave was Omega Race. It was better than even the C-64 version.

Just got my The Vic-20 by Retro Game and started looking for games that I played as a kid, but also games I didn't have back then. Thanks for the tips!

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

I had a VIC-20 for a short while before we upgraded to a C64 (the computer that shaped my childhood). I’m not as attached to this machine as much as I am the 64, but this was a fascinating video all the same. I wasn’t aware of any of these games and not only do they look good, but the carts are really cool too. Thanks for sharing!

Plaque Attack and GORF were some of my favs

Raid on fort knox. My mum played that for hours in the 80's

Had my VIC 20 functioning as remote control for a (already back then) retro video recorder, one input pin took the adapted infrared signal, 8 output pins toggled a resistance net by reed relais. So a video editing device could operate with that 1st generation recorder. Sadly I did not listen to my electrician friend, who advised my to protect the VIC output ports by Zener Diodes; so that computer died one day. Some 30 years later I remember that a kernel problem never gets bigger than what you can solve with 3.5K RAM, if you understood it, at all. Just wrote a portable emulator to get things back. For cassete deck I need an interface emulation from VIA 6522 to cassette conector; may be a USB to RS 232 TTL converter could serve.

It must have been 1983 or so when my mom brought a VIC-20 home she bought from a Coworker. I remember the Coworker showing my brother and I how it worked. I was 5 at the time and didn’t understand how the tape deck worked. My brother told me a little truck had to drive from the deck through the cable to the TV and thats why it took so long haha...he’s lucky I didn’t cut the cable open to find the truck lol

Fun stuff! Never played the Commodore games, but it’s on my list of things I’d like to try. The Living Computer Museum here in Seattle (RIP) had a C64 that I’d play whenever we went. Thanks for sharing!

Still upset that Melbourne House never made a Hungry Horace video game for the Vic-20

Never played a Vic-20. Looks fun though!

That joystick overlay tho. Up=up. Down=down, Left=left. Right=right. Fire=fire.

Omega Race and Gridrunner are my two clear favourites on the Vic. I still play them almost weekly. Shamus is brilliant and way beyond what many would think possible on a Vic. Other games you didn’t mention that I think are terrific on the Vic 20 include Moon Patrol, Donkey Kong, Jelly Monsters (one of the very best Pac-Man clones), Radar Rat Race, Lode Runner and Slap Dab. Thanks for a terrific episode John.

The Star Trek game is beautiful. Like colorfull Asteroids and a front view window added.

Amok and Super Amok were also great, especially if you're a fan of Berzerk like games

I had C64 and I love it till today! Nowadays only on emulator but I hope for a newly released hardware too. As we say, what has not yet come is not yet gone! :) These are the first games on Vic-20 that I've ever seen. I would say, I liked Avenger, which I knew as Space Invaders and I played that even on real arcade machine in the eighties. I was a teen back then! I also liked Omega Race and Shamus. I was amazed at how fast games are on this hardware. I'll surely get the emulator and try out some Vic-20 games as well.

My memories of the C-Vic20 are of working as a manager for a Hi-Fi electronics chain back when they first came out, and upper management bought a bunch of them in order for us to modernize our inventory system and various record keeping needs, that was rather comical, we ended up using them to play video games similar to what you have showed here. Glad you showed this, brings back some kool memories, Thanks :_)

Ya hey John I started with the Vic 20. I got hooked on the text adventures by I think Scott Adams. Adventure, count of Monte christo. Bc tires, mega race and a bunch more cartridge games. I sold it to a friend and bought the c64 and man I loved that computer. If these kids had to wait for the games to load like we did they would never have played...lol favorite c64 games air Bourne ranger, and realm of impossibility, and all time favorites telengard, wasteland, bards tale, adnd pool of radiance. Loved both Vic 20 and c64. Thanks for the video. Brings back memories. Cool times back then.

Vic20 was my first computer early 80’s before C64 and Amiga 1000. My first game was Jupiter Lander, but we soon also buy Gorf because couldn’t use that awful Commodore joystick with Jupiter Lander. After that also got Sargon II Chess cartridge. Local bookstore did give Vic20 Infos Computer Club members collection tape that had games like: Bliz, Amok, Gridrunner, Alien Bliz and few Finnish card games. There was Finnish Amersoft Track & Field (Yleisurheilu) game that needed 8K mem expansion and paddles. After this also got Psycho Shopper game that need 8K. With Vic20 we want to school computer club where children take their own computers and used with school BW televisions. Moved to C64 after see and hear Ghostbusters first time. But Vic20 will always be at my heart because it was my first home computer.

Thanks Inmortal. Vic20 deserves respect its games are good too.

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

i had no idea the vic 20 was this good.

Great video man. Like you said Gridrunner is still very much alive. The Steam version is awesome

The Vic-20 was my first computer and I played most of the games mentioned in the video. Omega Race, Gorf, Radar Rat Race (Rally X clone) were all good arcade conversions and some of my favorite. I also played all of the Scott Adams Adventure Games that ported to the Vic.

Good video! My friends had C-64 computers. Never saw the Vic-20 computer! First time, I have ever seen these games on the Vic-20. Nice!

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.